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Comment by joemazerino | Hacker News Reader

Those who celebrated Trumps ban off Twitter will quickly see how the tables can turn. What is worse is that I can't come up with a suitable answer to the Twitter censorship problem. Regulate? Remove 230?

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> I can't come up with a suitable answer to the Twitter censorship problem

Protocols over platforms. Get to a critical mass in a blogging protocol such that posts can be shared between platforms and apps that each moderate, or don't, according to their own needs.

The power of Twitter is in their silo. When enough of us de-silo they lose their power.

Removing 230 would lead to exponentially more bans, as Twitter would be liable for anything users said. Regulation? Well, do you want the government to force you to allow me to put political signs on your lawn? Same thing. Twitter is private property, they can kick you off if they want.

I honestly don't see Twitter lasting much longer. They'll ban and woke mob their way to halving their user base. Once the mob finally has their safe space, investors will let them know how much that's worth.

If it's less toxic wouldn't it more valuable?

Investors typically want users and growth. It doesn't look good to be declining, no matter how you spin it. And toxicity is in the eye of the beholder, generally.

Depends on if it was actually toxic, or just full of people who want it to be toxic so they have something to fight against. I recently read a book by Alan Watts, and he said that one thing that liberal and conservative morality police have in common is that they don't actually want things to improve things, it's just the justification they use to try and control people. If either group were to "win", they'd just find some other cause to be upset about.

What's the name of the book? It sounds like an interesting read.

All the woke mob knows is anger and destruction. Leave them together alone and they'll turn on each other. This is a documented phenomena at this point.

Twitter was a far better experience before right-wingers discovered how to use it. After that, any sort of political discussion on the platform became an inexorable shouting match drawn out over months. Yes, I'm aware of the fact that left-wingers have learned and employed the same tactics since then. I care less about that problem because they do not have the same institutional support that Donald Trump used to enjoy.

Remember: Twitter bent over backwards to make exceptions to their own rules to keep Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone on their platform. Hell, they even exempted him from their repeat infringer policy that the DMCA mandates they have. If January 6th hadn't happened, he'd still be tweeting, and Twitter would still be coming up with new policies and arguments for why Donald Trump should remain on their platform.

I don't even think politics is the biggest problem. It's that everyone is trying to out virtue signal each other. Yesterday's mob was blasting Sotomayor for mispronouncing Kamala. Thinking it was bad, I watched, and I couldn't even figure it out. Best I can figure is she put not enough emphasis in the middle? It's ridiculous.

Just waiting will do. Let the free markets decide and please, for the love of god, don't involve governments. They are already stupidly powerful, let's not give them more of it ourselves.

Free markets cannot work without some oversight from the government - esp for the protection of rights of individuals against monopolies. Unfortunately the biggest consumer tech giants (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc) have turned into 1 giant monopoly (since they collude illegally, as numerous news leaks have shown).

The only way to truly protect the rights of the individual would be for the government to step in at this moment to put big tech in it's place. Unfortunately I have very little confidence that it'd actually happen. Esp since the newly elected government in the US seems firmly on the side of big tech (political contributions and what not).

Failing government intervention, I fear a technological dystopia is not too far away in the future, if not already here. The other alternative ofc would be for individuals to take back control by moving out of these platforms towards their own personal websites with custom email and RSS feeds.

I love how in other threads the past 2 weeks, folks were considering the trump ban a one time, extreme thing that wouldn't happen again.

Heres the thing, what if Biden decides to strengthen consumer privacy rights? Who will lose the most out of it? The same folks who are now controlling popular narrative. "You dont want to end up like Trump, do you?" Think about that. How hard is it for them to propagate anti-Biden rhetoric now? Twitter has free reign of changing people's opinion by Twitter declaring what is true and what is disinformation.

When they started the warning labels on tweets three or four months ago, it seemed inevitable that it would escalate in this direction. It's happening even faster than I expected, though.

This problem has been festering for four years: Twitter deliberately carved out exceptions for "world leaders" that, in practice, applied to Trump and Trump alone because they really liked having @realDonaldTrump on their platform, even though he was flagrantly breaking their rules. Trump said things on Twitter that I could not.

The best thing I could see going forward would be a legal requirement for online platforms that broadcast content to others to apply their moderation rules even-handedly. This could be effectuated by either banning ToS terms that allow arbitrary and capricious moderation; or by reducing the scope of CDA 230 immunity to prohibit carve-outs for specific individuals, in the same way that DMCA 512 immunity goes away when you start rejecting legally valid counternotices or ignoring repeat infringers (which, BTW, they also did for Trump).

The simplest no-brainer answer to the censorship problem is for everyone to own their personal websites with custom email and RSS feeds so that friends and family can "follow" you. Nobody can censor you on your own website can they? ;)

We will continue celebrating the removal of abusive assholes from platforms which would otherwise serve to facilitate their abuse.

The duly elected government of a country is a different matter entirely.

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