Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push ads and approved narratives.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.
The specific cases are less important than the overall trend which is social media companies using their control of who sees what to influence public opinion. It’s common to think in terms of users being banned or users being censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of reality than what traditional media can achieve. Essentially it’s possible to make public opinion look like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control which issues are at the front of people’s minds.
They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.
Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.
The complaints around censorship have to do with users posting anything related to certain viewpoints (in fact or in error) no longer being able to post anything at all.
Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.
If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.
The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or published, or is soft-censored by muting its distribution...that is censorship.
One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".
Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others.
Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.
I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing
- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ
- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud
- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]
I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
What about blocking an article about Hunter Biden's laptop?
What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.
Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.
I applaud this objectivist stance (I think we all agree facts exist) but speech can be about interpretations of facts.
If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".
Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.
Advocates for free speech that support a "public square" model of free speech but who refuse to adapt that to the modern digital communication systems are doing more harm than good in my opinion.
A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).
What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.