"I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for.
What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.
The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."
For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math.
I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.
The agora in which civic engagement is happening is crowded by assholes with speakers, and bots, and anonymous posters.
This is not conducive to progress.
If you have problems with the world around you, you can act on these problems. Writing on social media is akin to making a powerpoint to change the world. It's just the wrong tool.
Instead of getting worked up writing, sit down and think about the levers you have access to.
You probably are in the 1% of the people with the most means in history right now, typing a few lines is very well below your means.
a) because services like Twitter and Facebook have to show something in the timeline. What they show is this job
b) because in practice, an approach too laissez-faire here has negative impact both on customer adoption (most people don't actually enjoy cesspools, and they leave when they decide a service is one) and regulation (even in countries with broad free-speech protections, some communication is de facto illegal and there are consequences for a service taking no responsibility for keeping their house in order).
It's called a search engineer, and this isn't left to people's own discretion because they don't have the time or inclination to make their own search engines / recommendation engines.
If there's someone we can't trust to kill/harass/assault people, they need to be in prison, not having speech policed for them as if they were a child. That's one of the core purposes of imprisonment, in fact.
But the reality is that we can, in fact, trust most people to not do those things. And yes, that means sometimes we will be wrong and we will have to pick up the pieces after someone does something awful. That is simply part and parcel of living in a free society.
The people being threatened disagree with you. They aren't living in a free society. They are forced to protect themselves, both in real life and online.
Personally, I'd be in favor of enforcing existing laws about threats. Make a death threat, go to jail. Law enforcement is pretty bad at that, with the excuse that most death threats turn into action, and it's very difficult to track down an anonymous commenter.
But I'd like to see what would happen if they took the existing laws seriously. Maybe then I'd find it easier to credit the notion of unrestricted free speech that doesn't rise to the level of criminality. I'm not convinced, but I'd at least be able to consider it.
Meantime, "Somebody threatened to kill you and that's your problem until you're actually dead" does not seem like an acceptable situation.
I think it’s more like “rather than engaging with toxic material by you being toxic, just go to books that are high quality and now there’s less toxicity in your world.”
What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.
The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."
This is advice for the layperson.