Comment by forest_dweller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forest_dweller | Hacker News Reader

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I don't doubt that has been your experience. However there are several things that some would take issue with.

The first being your framing. The discussion is frequently framed in the following manner: Complaints about having their content remove or discussion groups removed is some sort of nazi-larping shitposter or other undesirable looking to cause trouble. I am sure there are quite a few that may fit into that, but you cannot lump all complainants into that category because it just isn't true.

The second is that is fundamentally doesn't address the actual complaint itself. When people are complaining about removal of content on social media, they aren't actually complaining about the rules per se. They are complaining about how they feel the rules are enforced.

Frequently the compliants are (but not limited to):

* That enforcement of the rules is applied arbitrarily and overwhelmingly favours one particular group based on the personal politics of the moderators. Whether that is true or not is another matter, they perceive it to be so and this isn't frequently addressed.

* Context is frequently ignored within a discussion and because it has certain verboten terms it is removed. This is true because this has happened when content in the UK have been removed because people have used local colloquisms that are considered offensive outside of those communities but not within them.

e.g.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/faggots-peas...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7911927/Meat-lover-...

* Enforcement is more lenient if someone is well-known (a presumably makes signifcant income for the site and themselves).

When you talk about framing, you see it from a currently popular viewpoint on free speech/moderation. However this can be a bit too narrow and circumstantial.

The number one question is : is civil debate possible? And, and second, is the platform suitable for civil debate?

My own viewpoint is from my experience that mass moderation is not possible, or at the very least unlikely to yield results that are favorable to either the platform (say Facebook) or the user. And probably even damaging, as in your banned words example.

In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience. However this entirely depends on the circumstances. I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.

I do think mass moderation is impossible. If they tried to remove things that were obviously illegal and kept to that I would fine to accepting that. I appreciate there is now government involvement which brings it own complications especially with regards to an international business. So maybe it is just not possible.

> In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience.

Funnily enough a friend who went to Berkerley University was making the same point about debate today in a discord chat. I will admit I am more of a layman but try to stay away from many of the common fallacies in argumentation. It is an interesting idea that moderation itself is something that would need experience.

> I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.

I would say reddit being the prime example. People always bring up the really vile stuff e.g. r/jailbait, r/natsoc (or whatever it was) as examples, the first I would remove in a heart beat as it isn't a free speech issue. However the list of subreddits and the posts that were being removed were often a lot less controversial IMO.

However one of the other comments, somewhere else in this thread I responded listed a lot of "right-wing" content in itself is somewhat objectionable. People have to remember that includes centre right libertarian types (like myself, I am a free market capitalist) and people who just believe in more old fashioned traditional values.

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