
A Framework for Moderation - jonbaer
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
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snikeris
> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will
> be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent
> ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more
> dangerous medium.

The notion behind this seems to be:

"We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas."

Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing
view of our fellow humans?

~~~
bdhess
It’s not implying that many or most people are idiots or untrustworthy. But
that there are extreme outliers at the fringes.

Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the
internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate,
intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be
fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department
stores.

~~~
snikeris
> Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the
> internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of
> hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble
> it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to
> department stores.

I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have
made the same argument when the printing press came out.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
When a problem gets orders of magnitude bigger, it can be considered a
fundamentally different thing. Requiring different solutions.

~~~
the_snooze
I feel this is something that technically-inclined people tend to downplay too
easily. Scale matters. Scaling something up changes its very nature and
implications. Just because we can enjoy party poppers doesn't mean we're cool
with flashbangs exploding near us.

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jrochkind1
A very good article, with a very poor title.

It's actually a summary of the _legal_ regimes involved, and some thoughts on
the ethics of moderation, as it applies to entities at different places in the
stack.

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opwieurposiu
I have seen so many articles trying to pin this blame on trump, 8chan, video
games, cloudflare, epik.

I have yet to see an article placing the blame on the guy that pulled the
trigger. Why is everyone else but him responsible for his actions?

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Because everyone is looking for a way to prevent more people than just him
doing this.

The virtue of individual responsibility is awesome until you deal with things
done by more than one individual because of a common cause.

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LordHumungous
I lean towards free-speech absolutism, I was against banning Alex Jones for
example. However, encouraging violence, as 8-chan does, is not included under
even the most expansive definitions of free speech. Nuke it from orbit.

~~~
danem
As a free speech absolutist you should support Youtube or Twitter's right to
ban who they wish from their platform. What about their right to free speech?

~~~
m-p-3
An individual is a person, a corporation/platform isn't. Especially when we're
talking about YouTube, which (for now) has no alternative equal in size or
reach.

Free speech is being stiffled by corporations that offers shared spaces, that
even a government is unable to provide.

The government is bound to the Constitution, while some companies bigger than
some countries in terms of capital, are not bound to these checks and balance.

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dantheman25
I'm not sure that I agree with the author's stance that Cloudflare is more
infrastructure than content platform. Cloudflare is part CDN and part security
service. While both are useful in _facilitating_ the distribution of content,
the services that Cloudflare provides are not _necessary_ to that distribution
in the same way that access to the internet via an ISP is.

Whatever the controller of some botnet's likely course of action is in
response to the distribution of content they don't like, it doesn't change the
fact that Cloudflare is merely providing a content distribution service, a
service that publishers could go elsewhere to obtain or even build for
themselves.

~~~
antepodius
You could obtain water elsewhere, or build a distribution network for
yourself.

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jrochkind1
Cory Doctorow's novella "Radicalized", in the recently released collection of
the same name, is a story about internet forums where men egg each other on to
commit mass murder... cause they're mad about healthcare in the U.S.... and I
don't wanna spoil the ending, but it has something to say about whether this
is an effective tactic...

> Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against
> insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure
> funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

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zdmc
I take the slippery slope argument seriously, however, maybe there is a
compromise: we could (at least attempt to) come up with a measurement of
content risk and (at least attempt to) agree upon some threshold of what
constitutes "extreme" beyond a reasonable doubt. This way we continue to
preserve fringe views while also properly suppressing harmful outliers.

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nailer
Just a heads up: according to the founder of 8chan, the gunman did not post
the manifesto on 8chan. Someone else did afterwards.

~~~
laughinghan
In the same breath that the owner of 8chan made that claim (literally the same
breath, he made the claim in a video), he also claimed that the gunman
uploaded the manifesto to Instagram first. Instagram says that's false, the
gunman's Instagram account hasn't been active for a year. I'm inclined to take
Instagram's word over the owner of 8chan: [https://www.cnet.com/news/8chan-
owner-says-el-paso-shooter-d...](https://www.cnet.com/news/8chan-owner-says-
el-paso-shooter-didnt-post-manifesto/)

Also, that claim was by the owner, not founder, of 8chan. The _founder_ of
8chan now disavows it and celebrated on Twitter when Cloudflare took it down.

~~~
nailer
Thanks for posting the article. Acknowledging that the owner, not founder,
made the claims. As you say, one should take 8chan with a grain of salt.
However it's still worthwhile to note the claim is disputed.

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freen
Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

