[jackosdev]

Isn't he going to be bringing back people who were banned off the platform, that's more democratic. US has a bunch of problems but the one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence, I thought the major purpose of Elon wanting to buy twitter was to uphold freedom of speech as it is written in the constitution, given it's something of a town square now.

[lapcat]

> one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence

Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money).

You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak.

Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.

[Nomentatus]

Indeed, the fringers scraped together enough cash to mimeograph a few dozen leaflets and tucked them under cars windshield wipers; but that didn't get them far. They might be able to take out a cheap ad in a rag magazine advertising a self-published book, but that's about it. There weren't boards to put up posters, and putting a poster on a telephone pole (etc) was a crime (recent court cases have changed that without a change in the law, where I am.)

[harimau777]

I think it's somewhat more complicated than that.

Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam.

In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.

[jerojero]

There are different views on what freedom means.

In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence.

Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.

[amadeuspagel]

Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.

[pmoriarty]

You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private.

The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.

Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.

Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.

[jerojero]

The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.

In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.

[danjoredd]

That happened to me on a Discord server I was a mod of. Too much fighting and genuine hatred led us to just shut the place down. While it was small it was fine, but after it grew it began being intolerable and all of us mods decided to just shelve it. Nobody can post, but now its just a place to store Discord emojis and stickers

[amadeuspagel]

Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space.

[pmoriarty]

"Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space"

You can do exactly the same thing on IRC... and IRC had that a long time before Twitter even existed.

[amadeuspagel]

Not quite the same thing. Yes everyone can create their own IRC channel. But in practice ... On twitter everyone tweets and blocks people.

[ss108]

Impressive deployment of buzz words.

[hagbarth]

People will leave pretty quickly if there is no moderation. People don't want to be in such places. Just check the missing popularity of Parler.

[amadeuspagel]

Network effects are a perfectly sufficient explanation for why people don't use parler. Can you name one example where people switched from a bigger to a smaller network, because the bigger one allowed too much freedom of speech?

[lupire]

Why don't "free speech" networks ever grow to be the bigger one in the first place?

[amadeuspagel]

Twitter and facebook did grow big when they were free speech networks.