Twitter needs politically neutral content moderation, minimalist but strict
It is more than a year since I last posted here. I fact, I don’t update this website often. If you want to follow me, my main website is Turing Church, a Substack newsletter / podcast about cosmism, metafysiks and spaceflight. Please subscribe!
When I want to say something that doesn’t fit in Turing Church, I say it here.
So here we go:
After a long saga, Elon Musk has acquired Twitter.
I’m an Elon fan. See my 3-parts love letter to Elon (1, 2, 3). TLDR: Elon wants to make humanity multi-planetary, and this is what is really important. See also this post. We are tweeting birds waiting to fly to the stars.
So I’m happy to see that Twitter now belongs to Elon. I’ll be tweeting much more to show my support for Elon, Capt’n of Twitter and Spaceship Earth. I’ll think of every tweet as a tiny contribution to our multi-planetary future.
What does the future hold for my new favorite social network?
Content moderation is the hot issue. Elon calls himself a free speech absolutist (I just love this guy), but he realizes that, without some form of content moderation, Twitter would become a hellscape.
In the future imagined by Neal Stephenson in “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell” (2019), the raw internet is so full of spam and fake news that everyone is forced to hire “editors” to filter the crap out. If this is the future of Twitter, users and advertisers will go. Elon knows that.
Of course spam must be removed as fast and efficiently as possible. Same for *really fake* news.
But Twitter is known to have removed or hidden real news that the moderators found politically inconvenient (that is, likely to damage their own political camp). This is not acceptable. Removing or hiding real news is equivalent to promoting fake news.
Similarly, removing or hiding information is equivalent to promoting misinformation.
Then there is the issue of hate speech. I’m not against reasonable moderation of hate speech, but I insist that all hate tweets must be treated exactly the same without political bias. This hasn’t been the case at Twitter so far.
In Twitter’s past, content moderation targeted only one side of the political divide. From one side, even calm and reasonable posters who dared questioning some fashionable cultural dogmas were punished (suspended or banned). But I have seen Twitter tolerating real hate speech including death threats and exhortations to violence when it came from the other side. This must end.
Content moderation must use transparent, crystal clear criteria, and exactly the same criteria for all political camps. We can’t have some users punished for opinionated posts that the moderators dislike, and other users tolerated even when they post death threats and calls for assassination (yes, I’ve seen that on Twitter). This must end.
Of course, a private company must be free to do whatever they like, within the limits of the law, and that includes being politically biased. But as a user, I don’t want a tech company to tell me how I must vote and what I must think. I’ll choose how to vote and what to think, thank you very much. I was prepared to leave Twitter if Elon didn’t take over.
As a libertarian at heart, I don’t like content moderation and I would like to see much less of it. But my pragmatic mind understands that this might not be a viable option. So if less content moderation is not a viable option, I’m willing to accept (as a necessary evil) even MORE content moderation: I welcome Twitter to continue moderating tweets from one political side, provided exactly the same moderation criteria are used for the other side as well.
Like Elon, I’m against moderation that goes far beyond the law. Borderline cases in the fractal boundary between allowed speech and hate speech, information and misinformation, should not be moderated.
In summary, I want a Twitter where all users can speak almost freely and the inevitable restrictions are enforced without partisan discrimination.
This is my Twitter moderation proposal:
- The moderation rules must be transparent and crystal clear;
- The moderation rules must be applied uniformly without political bias;
- Borderline cases must not be moderated;
- Zero tolerance for exhortations to violence and personal attacks;
- Zero intolerance for opinions expressed without falling into 4.
Cover picture from Stefan Becker, picture from pxhere.com.
