How free should public communications be?
General
Simple fact is that free-speech in a free-democracy does need regulation and, if we are serious about that regulation, we do have to be prepared to enforce it and sanction transgressions, ultimately backed with the power of the law. Guard rails in the current vernacular. Inescapable.
What is appropriate in the rules of communications, and what is proportionate in their enforcement are hugely context dependent. Even accepting that basic fact, it gets worse. Perversely, the broader the context – as in global public social media – the tighter the controls need to be. Let that sink in.
Current State
X/Twitter, post Musk, has made the error of absolute freedom, limited only by criminality in the communications. This leads to degenerate, unhealthy, polarising, high-noise, counter-productive discourse, long before we get to the last resort of legality. X/Twitter is currently failing to control either content or behaviour, and the inevitable degeneration is driving many to leave – or consider leaving – for pastures blue.
BlueSky has started to enforce “content” controls, simply by deleting the content. This is far too crude long-term, degenerate in the “woke/PC” direction, blocking/erasing anyone or anything that anyone MIGHT claim to be offensive to anyone for any reason. Hopefully this a temporary response to sudden surge in numbers – but it is already generating a backlash. And what it’s effectively doing is drawing the polarisation battle lines physically between these two platforms, making them very distinct silos or echo-chambers, not just different factional interests within any one platform. Doubly unhealthy.
Blocking, erasing, deleting or cancelling are NOT moderation. But, either extreme of freedom vs moderation is unhealthy. What neither of the above is doing is regulating what matters, which is behaviour. Very little content need be absolutely taboo (see legal constraints). Generally, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. Anyone who has ever moderated any serious online discussion group knows this is non-trivial philosophically and linguistically.
[Facebook / Threads is in a different game. Nothing to recommend it here?]
Mastodon, so far, has exhibited very little of the degeneration, although ad-hominem behaviour is already creeping in, despite much lower numbers and traffic than any of the above. What is different however is that whilst X/Twitter, BlueSky and Threads are centralised, Mastodon is distributed and federated.
Practical Possibilities
The question is always asked when controls are suggested – however sensible the rules themselves – “Who decides, who does the controlling and moderating?”. With centralised systems – especially one like the Musk / Trump alliance – this question has enormous authoritarian implications. With multiple federated systems with distributed moderation arrangements, people can experience and cluster around environments that suit their needs, and we can let market forces drive the distribution between Mastodon instances.
X/Twitter already has the hooks for distributed moderation in its “Community Note” mechanism, though even that is already gamed and abused. Ultimately it really is about behaviour. What none of them have yet is individual tuning of the dreaded algorithms. Personally I’m an “all / latest” user, in order to minimise the effect of feed algorithms, and is only practical if you keep numbers down. At this point it’s about commercial / monetisation interests of the platforms and the users. Personally, it’s the reason I’ve paid for my “Pro” X/Twitter instance, no-one need advertise anything I don’t follow. But much more configurable experience – including the moderation “style” – is needed.
Behaviour? See Rules of Engagement.
[END]
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Previously “Freeze Peach“ – an earlier draft to edit the rules of engagement to fit the social-media behaviour / moderation model.
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Post Notes:
All the people “announcing” their X/Twitter departures to their “new” BlueSky accounts are quite comical if sad. I signed-up to both BlueSky and Mastodon as soon as they became available, immediately after the Musk / Trump takeover which completed over 2 years ago, and have been monitoring activity and behaviour there ever since. (Links top right here and in my X/Twitter bio.) It’s about behaviour NOT about the technology.
I’ve several times labelled people like Colin Wright @SwipeWright and James Esses @JamesEsses and Matt Goodwin www.mattgoodwin.org as “trolls” in this game. On the specific content of their “anti-woke” agendas and statements I’m on the same side and mostly agree. It’s their extreme rhetoric I reject as #PartOfTheProblem – like their wishful yearning for Christopher Hitchens . Sure enough it grabs the attention of low-attention span men of few coherent words, like Musk / Trump, but it’s a dangerous game – cutting off noses to spite faces. I too have been “warning” the liberal-left @UKLabour @USDems @HumanistsUK they were missing the important message in the woke / anti-woke “culture war since I first read Alice Dreger on sex/gender politics in 2015 and more generally since I started this blog in 2001 and joined Twitter on SMS before it became an App in 2007. Warning continuously that if the liberal-left didn’t get a grip on the science / dialectic / facts vs subjective-identity / rhetorical / rights&freedoms balance, then the opposing right / libertarian press and politics were going to wipe the floor with them on the emotional issues. Let’s be clear, like broken clocks, people like Musk / Trump / Badenoch can be right twice a day on the woke / DEI agenda but still be wholly reprehensible, dangerous and unfit for office. They remain so. Retweeting without qualification? Careful what you wish for. You can have too much #CreativeDestruction
Yogi Yaeger on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@yoginho@spore.social
If it’s elitist to think we should have the best people lead us instead of corrupt morons taking over everything then, yes, do count me as an elitist.
If it’s against free speech to want pathological liars censored then, yes, I’m against free speech.
If progress is the greediest bastards pushing the most dangerous technologies on us for nobody’s benefit but their own then, yes, call me a luddite.
An extreme statement of the crux of the problem.
And an essay on why decentralised social media is best from Oxford via Mastodon, naturally.
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