Ask HN: Why are Twitter and Facebook so poor at moderating hate speech?

> Why does Silicon Valley feel as though it must not take a position on this?

Twitter and Facebook already do take positions: they actively kick people and groups off their services. Literally happens every day.

Prior to kicking people off, they actively "shadow ban" unsavory elements of their user base to prevent their ideas/hate speech from spreading.

Twitter even does this kind of shadow banning on a per-tweet basis. For instance, I follow a journalist named Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson). She would always retweet Trump and Clinton in pairs, but I almost never got the Trump retweets (which gave me the distinct impression she was pro-Clinton). I only found out about the per-tweet suppression Twitter employed when she started tweeting about it.

Twitter even goes so far as to put up big ass warnings now when you click on web links to content that violates Twitter's (progressive-friendly, anti-hate) terms of service! The one I saw most recently was for links to https://voxday.blogspot.com/, which is (apparently) some kind of white nationalist site. Presumably, some people who try and follow such a link in their feed will not actually read it, thinking it's some kind of malware site.

What more do you expect them to do? From my perspective, they're already doing a lot.

Part of it is that there is not a clear line of where legitimate discourse ends and "hate speech" starts.

Anyone know if Twitter is acting on users calling for the assassination of president elect Trump? Twitter seems to be pretty aggressive at inferring violations of their policies when someone squabbles with an SJW favored party. Trump is prolific Twitter user with a lot of followers ... are they just supposed to look the other way and ignore all the public death threats?

Wow, damned if you do, damned if you don't. From the right's perspective, Facebook and Twitter actively censors unfavorable political opinions. This goes way beyond just policing hate speech and is one of the biggest reasons the Left didn't see Trump's victory coming. Silencing dissenting opinions doesn't mean those dissenting opinions just go away. But it is funny watching an entire industry fall over themselves trying to figure out the obvious.

Maybe spreading the idea of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" rather than creating generations of people who need safe spaces and crumble at the smallest unpleasant thought would work better than trying to curb an element of human behavior that has gone on forever and will continue to go on (unfortunately) for a long time.

Trolling and misinformation exists on BOTH sides of the fence.

Lets look at one side: Your black so your automatically less

Lets look at the other side: Your a white male so you privileged

One of these is hate speech, the other is a protest/complaint about the current state of things. Functionally both are the same.

For years the courts have been cautious about dealing with language and the first amendment. If you sit down to think about WHY it is because it is a slippery slope.