[Magodo]

I'm curious what Americans think of this situation. There seems to be a separate rule set where right wing news sources are outright banned in the US but in other countries it's the exact opposite. Related news in India right now:

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/panel-grills-faceb...

Personally, I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content and should have censored things only after a valid court order is received (from local jurisdictions). Everything else should have been the wild west

[vorpalhex]

Yeah Twitter and Facebook have opened this can of worms on themselves by leaving a default neutral position. Now anything is open to takedown by anybody, and we're basically going to go from "everyone can post!" to "only official people registered with the government can post, and they can only post very boring things".

Of course, people will leave Twitter and Facebook as they become subpar and go to alternatives.

[tzs]

> Personally, I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content and should have censored things only after a valid court order is received (from local jurisdictions). Everything else should have been the wild west.

If you want to see what that is like, take a look at voat.co.

Wild west sties usually end up with three kinds of content.

1. Content about things that you'd also find on mainstream sites, and with decent user comments.

2. Content about things that you'd also find on mainstream sites, but the comments are full of talk about Jews and black people and gay people and the terrible things they have done to hide the truth about whatever the thread is about.

3. Rants about the need to take control back from the Jews and blacks etc, often by killing them all. All the usual insane conspiracy theories, although often spiced up with ties to Jews, blacks, etc that you don't see in the mainstream versions of those conspiracies.

#1 is usually low traffic. If you are interested in this stuff, the mainstream site will serve you far better.

#2 is often a decent amount of traffic. But if there are any useful comments they will be embedded among a bunch of the racist, antisemitic, anti-gay etc stuff. As with #1, you will probably find mainstream sites much more useful.

For an example of a #2 type discussion, see the comments to this voat.co /v/science [1] thread on pilot wave theory.

The end result almost inevitably is that the site ends up being only interesting to, and largely only populated by, those who are there for the racism, antisemitism, etc, or for the conspiracy theories.

[1] https://voat.co/v/science/4152241

[UnFleshedOne]

Isn't that because those kind of people are pushed out from everywhere and just end up congregating in a few places? If you relax rules everywhere, the noise will go down on average.

[Garlef]

> Personally, I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content [...}

Why do you think it should be this way?

[marcosdumay]

> I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content

As soon as they started to editorialize the content, by having a black box that decides what to show you, they didn't have an alternative anymore. If they didn't censor it themselves, people would notice that it's those companies spreading lies, not small people.

[pjc50]

> Personally, I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content

Even pornhub had to regulate content eventually. I doubt the pornographic facebook would have achieved it's current market penetration ...