Issues with moderating free speech.

[Rokazulu]

38 minutes ago, zurew said:

So basically, trying to make the mods accountable for their actions? I have some problems with this approach.

1. People with the biggest groups can dominate how platforms should work, they can reverse any ban they feel unjustified, and they can report people they don't like and get them banned (thats basically cancel culture)
2. Most bans that are going to be percieved as unjustified will be on the edge. What do i mean by that? I mean, that most of the unjustifiably percieved bans are made, because we are talking about such cases where the line isn't precise or clear so its on the moderator's interpretation to decide if its banworthy or not. Now, how you are going to manage to reverse that, when you can't defend it with clear points, you can only argue about interpretations? (so the people who wants to reverse some other person's ban, can only say that this x mod's interpretation of this post was wrong, so please unban him/her)

In those cases, where the ban is clearly unjustified, i would agree with this community driven approach, however in such cases where most people are angry about a ban is already avalaible. If enough people start to shit talk about a platform and their mods actions they will be forced to make changes.

Or if they don't make any changes, then the platform's integrity and prestige going to be hurt.

Look at it from being a platform owner perspective. You want to have a platform what you can fairly moderate, because if you can't moderate your own platform, then eventually you can lose your whole platform, because rascist and other bad faith people can dominate it and decide what can and what can't be done. So you are going to lose advertisers, promoters and business opportunities. 

The site does not have to subscribe to the viewpoint of bad faith people. They can do a number of things to show they do not subscribe to their point of view, such as warning signs over any topic not in alignment with the website's image, but is allowed because it is not yet a call to discriminate or use violence against anyone (Spotify, Youtube, Facebook pretty much do this with COVID-19, as an example). These people remain a minority, and unless we help them out of their trauma (which causes such negative beliefs to occur) then they will remain a minority and perhaps be absolved in time.

The community decides what is acceptable conversation and what is not.
I still don't quite see how having less people making those decisions, is more balanced than not doing so.
If we say it is, we have to discuss why a dictatorship or oligarchy is not as preferable as a democracy.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Rokazulu

[zurew]

24 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

If we say it is, we have to discuss why a dictatorship is not as preferable as a democracy

Its a good point, but its not totally same to the elections. There is a nuance to this.

We want to have a society where people have a say who they want to elect, but i don't think we want a society where people have a say in every possible specific issue including complex environmental,political,medical,psychological,economic issues. (Why? Because those are up for people who have enough knowledge and far more information avalaible to them to make far better decisions than i could ever make as a layman, with very limited information avalaible to me)

So my question would be for you, do you think that the majority of people who would engage in moderation would have enough time and  enough capability to make the right choices or do you think its more plausible that if a few highly developed people who has moderating as thier jobs , they could manage the bans and other situations regarding to moderating on a platform.

And again most people have actually a say in moderation (not individually, but if they do it in a large group) they can have a significant effect on platforms.

24 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

These people remain a minority, and unless we help them out of their trauma (which causes such negative beliefs to occur) then they will remain a minority and perhaps be absolved in time.

I don't know if they are that much of a minority, they are growing. But i agree that of course silencing them won't solve any root issues, but it can solve some problems for the platform's owner, and for some other people who are using the platform in a good faith way. ( I don't think that the platform owner's responsibility to solve the root issue for people, who have beliefs an thinking that is not acceptable in today society)

 

24 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

I still don't quite see how having less people making those decisions, is more balanced than not doing so.

I wouldn't say that it is more balanced, but the outcome of the bad decisions can be more easily managed, and the whole banning thing and moderation takes less time

Edited May 10, 2022 by zurew

[Rokazulu]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

So my question would be for you, do you think that the majority of people who would engage in moderation would have enough time and  enough capability to make the right choices or do you think its more plausible that if a few highly developed people who has moderating as thier jobs , they could manage the bans and other situations regarding to moderating on a platform.
 

If they desire balance, they have to make the time. Why would they be any less capable of anyone else, in making a good decision? What knowledge does a moderator have, that others do not?

 

Quote

I don't know if they are that much of a minority, they are growing. But i agree that of course silencing them won't solve any root issues, but it can solve some problems for the platform's owner, and for some other people who are using the platform in a good faith way. ( I don't think that the platform owner's responsibility to solve the root issue for people, who have beliefs an thinking that is not acceptable in today society)

Not paying workers a good wage also solves some problems for a CEO. But, we are speaking about more people than just the platform's owner.

 

Quote

I wouldn't say that it is more balanced, but the outcome of the bad decisions can be more easily managed, and the whole banning thing and moderation takes less time

You would value convenience over fairness and balance?

Edited May 10, 2022 by Rokazulu

[Danioover9000]

@Leo Gura

11 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Danioover9000 Nobody removed my comment. Calm down.

   I have finally found the comment! It must have been that night mode was on, which made the background screen colours dark grey, and your profile pic was nearly a perfect camouflage. I looked closely at @zurew image of your comment, and just followed the date until I saw it.

   With that out of the way, we can now focus on issues with moderations. I'm already seeing a few here with leanings towards anarchism and libertarianism. I immediately see a problem, because from what I've learnt of world history, I have yet to see examples of such libertarian societies flourishing long enough to become empires, and to eventually become civilizations. And not only that, if there were such societies, they didn't last that long, so the only valid conclusion I can draw from why there's this libertarian and anarchistic bend, in particular in online websites that have an online forum and online communities, is that such people are nested and secure inside a big, functioning society, for them to get away with what they say and write to some degree in such spaces, that there's this wiggle room for some degree of selfishness to be expressed.

   

[Danioover9000]

@something_else

7 hours ago, something_else said:

I don’t think that makes sense, hive mind is by definition the entire community. It isn’t really controlled by a select group of mods, kind of by definition

And generously, 50% of the people on any given subreddit are not the kind of people you want to have any say in how things are run lol

   Furthermore, it's sort of taken out of context. Hive mind is a description of a super organism in nature, that each member has precise roles to fulfill in it's colony, aka the ants, wasps, bees ect. I know that 'hive mind in this context refers to the group think that can permeate the online spaces and forums the lower standards of moderation, but they're not really super organisms.

   For example, the A.I robots in The Matrix movies, is a good fictional example of a hive mind, that has both elements of a decentralized system with a centralizing A.I that rules over every hardware and software of both the real world matrix, and the virtual matrix.

[zurew]

49 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

If they desire balance of power, they have to make the time. Why would they be any less capable of anyone else, in making a good decision?

Most people lack time. They don't have the time nor the desire to look through every post rigorously carefully to decide if it is banworthy or not. Its a full time job to do this its not easy at all, also what most people are lacking is the ablility to analyze things as unbiased as they possibly can.

So why moderators are better for moderating? Because they can do this full time, they have all the time in their hands, and in an ideal society they could be trained for the job ( they could be taught philosophy and how bias works, they could be taught to be multiperspectival and how interpreation works and they can learn all the nuances of the guidelines which most people don't know or misinterpret) they aren't trained yet for the things i mentioned, but its much more easier to train up moderators than to suddenly train all society.

Also i don't even know how your approach would work in practice. Lets say there is a platform with 10 million users. Lets say there is 3 million people who wants to ban a person called X. How this would work in practice? THey wouldn't be able to ban this X named people because less than 50% of the platform is voting for the ban and all the other people are not engaging in the voting? The same question arises with an unban. How can democracy work if not all people are engaging, and what is a time limit you can have to engage to vote?

Imagine there is a 1000 different ban reccomendation in a week ( of course in a large platform there is much much more) so do you really think, that all the members who are voting would rigorously looking thorugh all those 1000 people's posts, analyzing deeply what they did and in what context and they have enough time on their hand?

 

49 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

Not paying workers a good wage also solves some problems for a CEO. But, we are speaking about more people than just the platform's owner.

You still haven't made any argument in favour of your idea. You just tried to argue why mine is bad.

plus, i don't see how your approach would be any different from reddit. We know very well how reddit dynamics work, and i wouldn't call that ideal nor fair.

 

49 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

You would value convenience over fairness and balance?

Your idea is not more fair, because of the arguements i made above (people don't have enough capability nor enough time to be good moderators themselves) 

and again it would just open of more negative dynamics (like large groups using their power) In this case, who will make that large group accountable, if the owner has almost no say? How can you hold a group accountable? Its much more easier to hold an owner or a handful of people accountable for their policies and also for their actions.

49 minutes ago, Rokazulu said:

Not paying workers a good wage also solves some problems for a CEO. But, we are speaking about more people than just the platform's owner.

Why would that owner be obligated to give a platform for society if its negative for him/her at the end of the day. You need to balance both sides out.

Edited May 10, 2022 by zurew

[Rokazulu]

The proposed system within that document, actually calls for a random jury to be selected by users who have to reach a consensus of whether or not that mods acted in good faith with the network policy in their bans. Seems rather simple to me, but if it is an open source system, new ways of moderating can actually be implemented and voted on if the community finds them to be more efficient or more fair.





 

[zurew]

@Rokazulu Can you point out any existing platform or place, where your system kind of already in place, or there isn't any yet?

[Rokazulu]

This is the site:
https://www.minds.com/


 

[zurew]

@Rokazulu Thanks. Will check it out.

[ZzzleepingBear]

Free speach always comes at a cost it seems.

[Danioover9000]

@ZzzleepingBear

On 10/05/2022 at 10:43 PM, ZzzleepingBear said:

Free speach always comes at a cost it seems.

   It is one of many trade offs living in a democratic system rather than an authoritarian one. The authoritarian one would silence most speech that has any direct or implied anti government rule, but in a democracy there's enough wiggle room for that. This is because the authoritarian government has a lot more centralized power of the ruling class or figure head, whereas the democratic government has mostly distributed decentralized power over to the people, with some centralized power left for the governing body. In practice we went from a devil or group of devils ruling a kingdom, empore or civilisation, to mini tyrants that rule most democracies today.

   Right now, the internet is a symbol of when democracy has gone too far, people posting messages, images in privately owned or publicly owned websites as if it's still covered by free speech, unafraid of any challenge or pushback. Maybe it's time for the internet to be regulated much more.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Danioover9000

[ZzzleepingBear]

1 minute ago, Danioover9000 said:

@ZzzleepingBear

   It is one of many trade offs living in a democratic system rather than an authoritarian one. The authoritarian one would silence most speech that has any direct or implied anti government rule, but in a democracy there's enough wiggle room for that. This is because the authoritarian government has a lot more centralized power of the ruling class or figure head, whereas the democratic government has mostly distributed decentralized power over to the people, with some centralized power left for the governing body. In practice we went from a devil or group of devils ruling a kingdom, empore or civilisation, to mini tyrants that rule most democracies today.

   Right now, the internet is a symbol of when democracy has gone too far, people posting messages, images in privately owned or publicly owned websites as if it's still covered by free speech, unafraid of any challenge or pushback. Maybe it's time for the unternet to be regulated much more.

Thats a great summary.

Regarding the internet, I find it a bit more abstract since it's a global phenomenon. But rules always need some sort of maintenance, so maybe there needs to be some more regulation, but that could depend alot on what kind of site we are talking about. Different games, different rules kind of thing.

[Consept]

I really try and steelman the free speech absolutist but I just think they havent fully understood the implications of what complete free speech would actually be, a in it just just wouldnt work. What people tend to mean is that i want freedom to say what i want and i have the best intentions to respect others freedom, but that is until of course others say something theyre strongly against. 

[zurew]

People who say there shouldn't be any moderation at all, i don't really believe them, because if i were to ask them these questions most likely they would backtrack.

The question are: Would you be okay if people would be allowed to share without any penalty:

1. Your medical informations (including all the medical procedures you went through, all the surgeries, all the medicines that you need to take etc)
2. Information about your private life (Your address, images about your home, images about yourself when you are inside your home, information about your sexual life [for instance porn sites would be allowed to share all the data they gathered about you], information about your private documents like [driving license,  identity card etc]
3. Videos and images about rape, murder, torture etc.
4. Sharing private information about business products and services (like passwords, and information about the products, and sharing content that should be paid for)

With that being said, most people don't agree with where the line is being drawn. Debating about where the line should be drawn is necessary to really drop all the unnecessary rules. However, when debates like that happen, we should be able to look at this problem not just in terms of our own individual lense (what we want ourselves to be allowed to do), but what society in general should be allowed to do on that particular platform.

These rules should be based on principles. Why principles? Because we can't make an infinitely long list about what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. There could be an infinite number of edge cases, where the line isn't clear, and if there isn't any direct rules for that, then we can't solve any of those cases). This is why strong, clear core principlesrules should be made and we should build on those.

Debates about morality happening the same way. There are principles, and we compare those principles (with principle x what are the worst case that can happen and what are the best ways that can happen, the same goes for principle y). Then we can debate why principle x is worst or better than principle y.

We can think about principles like we think about a system. We drop  certain inputs into that system, and it can evaluate in our cease, if we should be allowed to say it or not. But the system should be very clear and understandable.

Also we can't forget why that particular platform was created in the firstplace. Different platforms with different goals require different set of rules.

Edited May 18, 2022 by zurew

[Danioover9000]

@Consept

On 5/18/2022 at 3:05 PM, Consept said:

I really try and steelman the free speech absolutist but I just think they havent fully understood the implications of what complete free speech would actually be, a in it just just wouldnt work. What people tend to mean is that i want freedom to say what i want and i have the best intentions to respect others freedom, but that is until of course others say something theyre strongly against. 

   I think those free absolutists just want freedom to say opinions at 100%, but haven't seen far enough that sometimes freedom of speech effects freedom of actions.