National Affairs has an interesting forum on this topic. In an article about the issue of speech regulation on the big social media sites, Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman write,
Writing increasingly specific policies, hiring more moderators, developing appeals processes, automating speech moderation with machine learning, and outsourcing fact-checking decisions to “trusted sources” are all attempts shore up legitimacy by bolstering the validity of a process. “Because that’s the policy” holds much more legitimacy for us moderns than “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “Because I said so.”
. . .Any kind of legitimacy requires communal norms. Ironically, despite the language of the platforms — all that talk of community standards and norms — it is precisely in the ways they have failed to form coherent communities that they have been unable to find the legitimacy to enforce norms of speech.
They talk about the good old days when there were actual communities on the Internet. They formed around old Usenet groups or blogs. These have a real human moderator serving to police norms.
They have written a great essay, difficult to excerpt. Yet I found their diagnosis more persuasive than their prescription.
Some of it reminds me of my essay, How the Internet turned bad.
“Yet I found their diagnosis more persuasive than their prescription.”
What are your thoughts on a better prescription? Is the status quo optimal?
Subject based groups like Yahoo Groups were preferable to personality based sites like Facebook. Yet Verizon bought Yahoo and closed groups down.
Groups.Io remains.
The man who digs his field as did his sire,
With honest pride, no Attalus may sway..
– Horace
Spurning the poisoned cup of the serial human rights abusers’ platforms is perhaps the safest individual course of action. And in the long run perhaps does the most to diminish their power. Self censoring costs one less than the potential cost of being targeted for being cancelled by the credit card companies, web hosting services, ISPs, book publishers, payment processors, and other blacklisters in collusion with The Party. The ascending social credit system is the ultimate enemy of free speech and those who would preserve any of their rights at all would do well to cloak themselves from the eye of Sauron. Personally, I think I am finally going to get around to getting an atom email account before they are outlawed. Studying the tactics of the Hong Kong demonstrators is a good idea as well. Of course this sounds over the top, but ask yourself why the government has countless thousands of accounts generating content on the anti-free speech/anti-human rights platforms like Twitter and Facebook but none on the pro-free speech/pro-human rights platforms?
Moderating blog comment sections is often an under or unappreciated burden for blog proprietors. The number of lightly moderated blog comment sections is dwindling rapidly. So let me join the others who have previously done so in expressing profound gratitude to the proprietor of this blog for allowing a lively and interesting comment section.
The heavy handed proprietors perhaps do themselves damage. Once a site becomes known for its heavy handed moderation, I am guessing that its traffic declines. There are several blogs I know that I no longer visit very often and don’t bother with the comments because they have been whittled down to pap.
Those of us who read a lot of alt-media, or follow blogs about cancel culture itself such as reclaimthenet.org, notice certain behaviors that are repeated almost every time that a comment gets moderated or the person posting it gets banned. Among the most common is that the site either tells the poster nothing at all, or falsely says that he has breached the site’s published terms of service (TOS) when in fact he didn’t. Sometimes this is simply a matter of interpretation (as when a post advocating color-blind institutions gets labeled as racism), but more often it is either deliberate dishonesty or the careless use of automated moderating software.
As a result, critiques like this one tend to whitewash aggressively moderated sites such as Twitter and Facebook because they publish TOS that sound very reasonable, when in fact the site only even pretends to follow them when someone other than the target is watching. It would be very helpful if Section 230 were amended or interpreted so that moderation which contradicts a published TOS were not considered to be “in good faith” as that phrase is used in Section 230.
“Yet I found their diagnosis more persuasive than their prescription.”
That is literally 90% of all my book reviews on policy books. Everything from Atlas Shrugs to Cult of Smart.
Yes, Arnold. Any kind of legitimacy requires communal norms. We have known that for centuries but we have also known that again and again there are people interested in grabbing the “legitimate” power of coercion for their own personal benefit (if anything, Hayek’s main works can be interpreted as the story of the struggle between the rule of norms and the rule of stationary bandits –pay attention to his definition of social order and compare it with the alternatives proposed by several others). These bandits have always attempted to justify the cancelation of old communal norms by relying on deficiencies of the existing social order and promising paradises with new norms enforced by them.
In your country, today rotten and corrupt democrats with their little lackeys that repeat daily their hate for those that don’t like them are not different from the same rotten and corrupt socialists in Spain, Chile, Argentina, and other countries where they struggle to grab and keep the power of coercion. The only relevant difference between the U.S. and the other countries is the relative size of your country in the world’s social (dis)order. Your country is too big in several dimensions but particularly too rich, and we should have expected that the rise of China was going to be an incentive for socialists everywhere to attempt again to grab power, as it happened in the 60s and 70s with the rise of the Soviet Union. In your country, already there are too many Hunter Bidens and Swalwells.