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I'll bite. Censorship of social platforms is absolutely necessary and this is obvious if you think about the problem for long enough, and even more obvious if you try to run one. Spam is a form of speech. You will get DDOSed by bad faith actors selling viagra without censorship. Now of course that's not what people are discussing, but almost all moderation is censorship. Censorship is table stakes to even be able to have a public community beyond a certain size, an uncensored public community would just be static, noise. If you look at the pure numbers only a small minority of (human) users actually get banned, and most of the censorship happens further down the moderation chain. What people are arguing over, in practice, is if maybe a fraction of a percent of users should be banned or not or should have their posts removed or not. Censorship is so pervasive it's not even recognized as such. The actual disagreement is over a very small fraction of users and rules that would in practice affect a fraction of a percent of users and perhaps spark a trend of self-censorship. Censorship of social media platforms is good, what's in question is if we're perhaps going too far, but the actual difference between peoples views when you look at things from far enough back is actually fairly narrow. Additionally trying to enable the average person to have "Freedom of expression" online while NOT engaging in censorship paradoxically isn't even possible. The key then as I see it is to keep censorship as minimalistic as practicable, have the rules be well defined, and to empower user self-regulation. It's also a concern to avoid, as much as is practicable, creating community schisms where a group splits off and creates it's own filter bubble which I consider to be outright dangerous (A threat to safety, if you will). For this reason, but also for its own sake, I argue for making efforts to avoid tyrannies of the majority. Because of these priorities, I usually present myself as a free speech proponent since I always seem to be saying people shouldn't be banned or suppressed, but in reality I support broad and sweeping and even automated censorship. |