Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise (opens in new tab)

> Aside, which online communities has Anil Dash created?

Stackoverflow? https://stackoverflow.com/company/management

What??? There are people out there getting death threats, getting doxxed, being attacked with all manner of epithets on Twitter. It stands to reason that maybe the experience would be better for those people without that sort of content directed at them.

> If you don't like the way a social platform is heading, then leave it. You are not entitled to a safe space.

Yes. And as a business, Twitter has a vested interest in not letting their platform drive away swaths of users due to toxicity. Indeed, one of the key reasons Facebook was successful is that users have the ability to restrict communications to the people they want to.

Spoken like someone who's never been the victim of a targeted harassment campaign. It's a little hard to take that view when people are posting pictures of your children's school along with their death threats.

But indiscriminately providing services to everyone (within the laws of your country), without booting people based on a personal agenda, is the ABC of gaining the trust of your users.

Think about what you're saying: corporations have the power to prevent you from saying anything online. Twitter and Facebook can ban you for your political opinions. Fine, you say: get your own website. Well, we've seen that your registrar, CDN, and hosting providers will also kick you off if they find your speech sufficiently offensive (or if enough pressure comes down on them to do so.) In the end, your ISP can do the same thing. Corporations own the commons we all use. Yes, the FA only protects you from government censorship, but the societal principle of free speech is not so limited. If you cannot speak because every commons is owned by a private corporation, or where any speech can be banned because a mob is threatening to protest you, you do not have free speech in any meaningful sense.

I don't believe the solution to our problems is to blithely conclude that corporations can do whatever they want, it's their platforms, and that anyway, it's about "hate" (who gets to define that?) We need to look very seriously about how communication has evolved since the 18th century and what "freedom of speech" means now, and how to settle it in a way that at least leads to democratically elected institutions having the power to restrict it, rather than corporate overlords.

I would also argue that repression of speech is a contributing factor to the rise of violence. As long as all speech is legitimized, there's a relief valve for despicable beliefs. The Nazi Party was born in an environment where political violence was already commonplace, and where nationalist rhetoric resulted in the nationalists being severely beaten. Consequently, only the most violent and committed people remained, who then organized their own violent mobs. Ultimately, the perception of being "repressed" by both mob violence and the state (the Nazi party was later banned) only lent support by people who felt for the "underdog" and radicalized supporters who felt that legitimate, nonviolent means would never be enough.

Problem is they and other media companies (and often the users as well) has ridiculous problems to understand the diffence between racism (judging and treating people different depending on who their parents where etc) and scepticism towards a recent immigration wave (do we want to relocate all these humans right here, right now? Can we help more people by doing it differently?)

In my experience, they're much more dangerous to the well-being of society than the people they're trying to silence, as they're generally authoritarians of the worst sort without a shred of remorse because they're doing it for The Right Reasons(TM) and are sure of it.

But if I tolerate you speaking, someone I view as an immediate and visceral threat to my society, I suppose I can tolerate just about anyone using words.

It's a shame we'll likely come to violence because you can't show the same tolerance, and use words not force on people you disagree with.

Newspapers and TV are controlled so you don't see too much of it. But any public internet site cannot avoid this without heavy moderation which at Twitter, Youtube, Facebook scale are not easy problems to solve.

The government supports free speech because it's important and a Good Thing. Just because private companies aren't required to do the same doesn't make it any less important and a Good Thing.

As for illegals, every major country in the world deports illegal immigrants, even good old Canada, to the chagrin of many who thought they'd walk over and be granted immigration status without any further effort.

In the end it's still taking political sides.

This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival.

And then, if you did draw ideological lines in the sand, who sets that line? Whom does it emcompass? Does it apply to religions? Do we exclude Christians and Muslims? Do we exclude anybody who ever said anything nice about Genghis Khan or the Achaemenid Immortals?

Establishing standards of tolerance is one thing, but defining where the lines are can be difficult, and possibly embroil anyone.