[Miraste]

Reasonable and well-put. I think we agree except in semantics--I see being for traditional forum-type policing as still pro-censorship on some level, and the debate as on finding what level is acceptable (e.g. more nuanced than "less").

I like your point about Facebook's size. They've been unable to define global rules in part because large segments of their user base hold directly opposite values to the point that stating their beliefs, genuinely held and of majority opinion in their communities, would be deleted under common sense trolling rules in other parts of that user base. Facebook has three options: leave everything controversial up, delete all of it, or take a side. They've done all three of these at various points and they've all been disastrous.

[g_p]

I think the other key issue around scale is that at FB scale, you simply can't realistically get consistency of moderation - or even a person reading each post.

At FB scale their moderation started with "you can hide it if it annoys you" (aka not bothering) - the easiest technical solution. Doesn't actual address the problematic content, but perhaps doesn't feed the trolls.

Going beyond that to any kind of action requires determining whether something breaks any rules, and also faces the issue that reporting is used as a weapon, so simply deleting everything (mass) reported doesn't work either... And figuring out if it breaks rules just falls back onto rules which are imperfect.

As you sum up well, they're at such a scale that they have complete polar opposites on the platform. And in a sense, perhaps what we need are more subdivisions, not fewer - maybe what we are seeing here is the symptom of existing tensions, albeit exacerbated through being able to reach an audience that disagrees in real-time.