Instagram’s CEO Wants to Clean Up the Internet

> To Systrom, it’s pretty simple: Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to shitpost. His network isn’t a public square; it’s a platform people can choose to use or not. When pressed on the matter, he asks, “Is it free speech to just be mean to someone?” Jackson Colaco makes the same point more sharply. “If toxicity on a platform gets so bad that people don’t even want to post a comment, they don’t even want to share an idea, you’ve actually threatened expression.”

Yes, it is free speech to just be mean to someone. The fact that this man is a leader of anything at all troubles me.

Neural Nets and computers aren't impartial. We should never be putting any power into them to affect real human discourse that NLP cannot possibly hope to accurately parse at this time.

> Is it free speech to just be mean to someone?

Yes. But thankfully for internet platforms, they are not bound by free speech.

> If toxicity on a platform gets so bad that people don’t even want to post a comment, they don’t even want to share an idea, you’ve actually threatened expression.

No, you've only threatened the appeal of the platform. Expression and free speech lives on outside of it.

Personally I agree that certain platforms have become so toxic that a portion of the users are leaving or failing to participate as they had before because of the right to free speech that many exercise simply for the purpose of being rude, hateful, or crude.

I will always advocate for an individuals right to free speech but at the same time I feel that a mom should be able to post pictures of her kids without trolls coming along and saying they are fat or ugly or worse, making inappropriate sexual comments about them. I do not think our founding fathers had this type of speech in mind when they protected speech as that was an enactment of a different time.

The internet allows the worst in people to rear its ugly head and we find ourselves here, at a moment in time where we have to question if a business owner is overstepping boundaries by putting in place systems to protect people from scummy comments.

I recognize the difficulty in balancing the rights of opposing sides. Surely there is a solution. At least Systrom and Ev William's have lofty goals in trying to clean up the internet.

Why can't CEOs just build products and help customers and abstain from moral crusades?