What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some overlapping grey area.
As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.
The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.
Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.
If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream.
> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
3/4 of what you mentioned is illegal in most places in the first place so it isn't point of contention.
And that isn't really a problem. Site deciding this or that political view is now bad is.
You try to put removing the illegal/disturbing content in same category as worldview manipulation. The first is way more black and white than the second and should not be considered together, even if similar systems are used for them.
The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.
And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.
What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.
If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.
I guess I should have been more explicit in the first response - but what I'm suggesting is that this conversation is better had in less absolutist terms than what you proposed. There was the implication that the other person somehow inherently wanted to control communication in a qualitatively different way than you (or I did).
That's not to go down the path of sophistry - but just to suggest to orient the conversation around where the boundaries should be placed in practical terms, and discuss where the differences in boundaries lie and on an issue by issue basis evaluate that, rather than absolutist/ideological terms.
"You want to control speech (and I don't)" doesn't really lead anywhere in terms of discourse. It's a dead end.
Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.
You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).
The printing press was seen as dangerous. Then the phone, then TV, and then the internet. And now it's social media.
Each time the arguments are the same. People worry that the "wrong people" will have the ability to share ideas to a broad audience.
And yet each time we've shown that more speech is correlated with an expansion of civil rights and liberal governance.
It was definitely a step forward for humanity but it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows.
doesn’t the FCC heavily limit broadcast television and radio who and what behaviors are tolerated? like very heavily, no?
and aren’t there limitations on what you can and can’t do with a telephone?
