Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

I believe that Twitter is 2 top-down edicts away from drastically improving their efficiency with fewer employees.

1) Dramatically reducing the size and scope of the speech rules they implement to something akin to "If the speech is legal in a country, then it's legal on Twitter" would reduce technical and operating complexity. Between developing the technical infrastructure to automate restrictions and bans, to having staff trying to judge all sorts of petty bickering between groups trying to take advantage of the rules to report and ban their rivals, I feel like Twitter is wasting a large amount of resources on stuff that they shouldn't even be trying to do. A smaller team could focus on the essentials: removing illegal content and responding quickly to actual issues of safety (stuff like death threats that might pose an imminent harm). Hell, I feel like Twitter is so involved in trying to get involved in Internet drama and disputes that they currently do a mediocre job on actually dealing with genuine safety issues.

2) I realize that the infrastructure to run a site as large as Twitter isn't trivial to maintain, but for a site that has so few real user-facing features, it's kind of surprising that their technical team is so large. If somebody just laser-focused them on a clearly defined set of important features and policies for the business to execute on, it seems like Twitter should be able to move much faster on the handful of things that are core to their business.

Aren't these two things contradictory?

1. "If the speech is legal in a country , then it's legal on Twitter"

2. "the essentials: removing illegal content"

Maybe also "and responding quickly to actual issues of safety".

> Aren't these two things contradictory?

No. Twitter's terms of use and acceptable conduct policy goes far beyond what they're legally required to remove.

> I feel like

There's your problem. You're feeling more than realizing. Twitter's most complex problems aren't infrastruture; it's adhering to various national laws on language while trying to keep hate speech off as well (they are doing a terrible job at this of course). But saying that they should just allow "free speech" is an extreme oversimplification and lacks an understanding of jurisdictions outside the US.

I'm not sure why your word-salad was a necessary response given that I explicitly said that they should remove illegal content where required.

> Dramatically reducing the size and scope of the speech rules they implement to something akin to "If the speech is legal in a country, then it's legal on Twitter" would reduce technical and operating complexity. Between developing the technical infrastructure to automate restrictions and bans, to having staff trying to judge all sorts of petty bickering between groups trying to take advantage of the rules to report and ban their rivals, I feel like Twitter is wasting a large amount of resources on stuff that they shouldn't even be trying to do. A smaller team could focus on the essentials: removing illegal content and responding quickly to actual issues of safety (stuff like death threats that might pose an imminent harm). Hell, I feel like Twitter is so involved in trying to get involved in Internet drama and disputes that they currently do a mediocre job on actually dealing with genuine safety issues.

You say that Twitter can reduce its operational load by doing what exactly what it is already doing. What "Internet drama" is Twitter trying to get involved in?

> What "Internet drama" is Twitter trying to get involved in?

Twitter's rules are weaponized by people that hate each other. Whether it's lone individuals or people using Discord and other social media to organize raids, petty people love reporting their rivals on Twitter for anything and everything purely to harm their account. They can do this because they know that Twitter is trying to regulate speech beyond what is legally required so there's a chance that this tactic can work. Trying to regulate speech beyond legal requirements is an open invitation for this type of behavior.

But don’t they also have to balance commercial concerns, i.e. advertiser willingness to pay?

This is the one semi-reasonable retort presented here. Let's say that Twitter does go to something like "all legal speech is allowed on Twitter" policy. What happens to their business?

Well, nobody can predict the future.

Maybe their business prospects instantly crash and burn.

But I think that Twitter is the unofficial brain of the planet and there's no alternative for all of the grifters out there. Celebrities, journalists, and corporations might talk a big game, but would they walk the walk? They would have to be willing to go without the network of attention they've built up.

The question might become, "Can Musk mentally withstand a few days/weeks of intense derision until something else hits the news cycle"?

Detoxifying platforms is a "new" responsibility that a lot of social media has discovered over the last decade and with good reason (again, not saying that Twitter is doing is well).

That responsibility has a few dimensions including financial (a platform that is overly toxic deters users and hence reduces ad revenue), moral (most corporations are a-moral by nature, but there are some attempts to assuage the public and deliver on a few safety features), and regulatory (hate speech is a real thing and can be enforced selectively (as opposed to "free speech" laws)).

Personally, I found the internet more exciting when people were allowed to use naughty words.

Ah yes, "naughty words", that's all that hate speech is. What a smart fella.

It is, actually. The opinions of people who use the n-word in a call of duty lobby or on 4chan shouldn't matter.

They're literal children

Have you ever considered that trying to regulate speech to avoid "toxicity" creates a feedback loop that actually intensifies "toxicity"?

Online debate used to very intense and used plenty of naughty language and what would be considered cancellable slurs, but never felt deeply personal. The winner of the debate was the person who presented the best ideas in the clearest fashion. People of all stripes: whether Dirty Commies or Filthy Libertarians could go to an off-topic board, have pages long debates all together about abstruse topics like who in the hell should build the roads, and then go back to shooting the shit about basketball and computer games without blinking an eye.

People had the chance to freely vent. This is a good thing. It's bad when pressure builds up in a system when it cannot be released.

Today, Internet discourse takes a different form. Partially due to iDevices and social media making the Internet accessible to every low-IQ person out there who has very little business ever sharing any ideas with anybody, petty and unintelligent people debate by trying to bait the other side into rule-breaking so they can appeal to daddy-corporation to hit the other guy with the ban hammer. Every minor disagreement drips with pure resentment and intensity. Just one minor moment of weakness where somebody borderline-arguably breaks a rule becomes a gotcha moment where the other side can feign being outraged so they can try and get the other guy banned.

This modern safe space Internet is the real "toxicity" generator.

Hate speech is not a joke. It predates the Internet. It has led to (and will lead to) massive atrocities. Some of the most well understood atrocities of the 20th century (Rwandan genocide, Nazis, Anti-muslim attacks in India, many others) were engineered via hate speech.

Without regulation, Internet tools will be used to (and are being used to) conduct mass scale human political change including manufacturing consent for war, hate, colonialism, etc.

The world is big, and not all centered around the American take on politics (Commies and Liberatrians). It's also much much bigger than "daddy-corporation" and minor disagreements. The Internet is a tool that governments and political actors use for control.

I would very highly recommend reading up on Hate speech outside the American context of "free speech" and the Internet.

> The Internet is a tool that governments and political actors use for control.

You want to avoid atrocities and genocide. Great! So do I. Isn't it a great thing that we're both on the same page with that? We don't disagree on ends, but we do disagree on means.

The Internet is a tool used for control. We both agree with that. Now think about what you want. You want to protect people from an authoritarian regime, yet you also want to have systems in place for speech to be controlled. These ideas are in conflict. If speech is controllable, it's a tool that will be used by people who actually want genocide.

An atrocity isn't going to come because some edgy teens call each other a bundle of sticks while discussing political ideas online or use some distasteful language while trying to blast each other in some game.

But an atrocity can come if there's systems in place to restrict allowed speech. Do you think the Uyghurs are allowed to freely use the Internet and fully communicate their experiences with the outside world? Or are the systems that China has in place to regulate China's Internet used to control what information gets out and further their abuse?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com