[pbasista]

> This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.

I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.

Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal.

Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening.

Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly.

Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it.

That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.

[dvdkon]

What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).

[pbasista]

In such a situation, the expectation about the content moderation would remain the same. Specifically, such a network should still disallow hate speech, actively seek it, remove it and ban users who repeatedly spread it.

[dvdkon]

Thing is, P2P networks are usually built to make this kind of blanket blocking/banning impossible. Mastodon is more distributed than P2P, but even then moderation only applies to one server. In this case, the operators of popular Pakistani servers could very well side against the author. In a more "pure P2P" setup, I could see users choosing which moderation authorities to follow, so there would be no way to do what you ask. (Most users still wouldn't see it, because who wants to see hate speech, but the choice would be on the users, and again the kind of people this smear campaign is aimed at might not have it hidden.)