I always thought this is the only future-proof way of dealing with "censorship". Leave it to the different governments to handle.
Social media has been having problems enforcing censorship by different cultural standards for years. In America people are outraged if they see a nipple. In Europe, people are outraged when Facebook takes down a photo of a nursing mom. Let's not get started on political moderation in places like Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Instead of a bunch of silicon valley liberals pushing their perceived standards and values onto the rest of the world, build tools and delegate the task to the local authorities.
They don't like the content? They can spend the time to moderate and remove it themselves.
Only illegal content should be moderated away by the platform, and only illegal in the sense of real human danger, not normal pornography or anti gay laws of Saudi Arabia.
Everything else, give users the tools to moderate themselves.
I wish you could have "filter lists" you can just subscribe to like ad block. You don't want to see something? Subscribe to a filter list. Or a community. Don't want someone to say something that is legal? Too bad.
Nobody would want to do that, for the same reason gmail is popular; everything would be instantly covered in spam and you don't have the time to fight spammers. The main value of a platform is getting rid of spam for you.
The fight against spam is entirely different from the fight against misinformation. It is dishonest to compare it to removing certain political talking points or discrediting or deplatforming them.
The issue that people have is not that they can see it.
It’s that other people can see it.
Filter lists for one’s own experience are not the goal of that outrage. Keeping certain information from spreading to others (controlling what third parties can see) is the desire.
The censorship urge is not “I am offended by this”, but more “if my neighbors read things like this, I am afraid”.
I think it stems from a low-trust society and the assumption that the median members of society lack critical thinking skills.
I think such a belief is incompatible with the idea of democracy, and that if that position is valid, than dictatorships and monarchies are also valid, as in that worldview, median people cannot be trusted to decide representatives for democratic processes.
I think it is the view taken by the true leadership of all world superpowers.
Whether a hypothesis is inconvenient or uncomfortable to contemplate is largely orthogonal to its likely correctness. I would estimate perhaps 20% of the population (perhaps 30% of the 18-70 population) as demonstrating what I consider reasonable critical thinking skills.
>Only illegal content should be moderated away by the platform, and only illegal in the sense of real human danger, not normal pornography or anti gay laws of Saudi Arabia.
Who decides what is normal or harming people? Facebook - on a page for users in Saudi Arabia - most definitely should not use US or EU or any other local law to decide what Saudi Arabian users should and should not see and what is or isn't harmful ("gosh, you can see her nipple!"). It is very clear in law in most countries that if a website is directed at users in X country then the laws of X country is what governs what is and isn't allowed. What you are arguing is that for example GDPR shouldn't govern Facebook. That is a standpoint, sure, but it isn't how courts see it.
In my experience it is often people in the US or EU that argue that laws they don't agree with (anti-gay laws of Saudi Arabia or Russia?) should not be upheld but if it is the other way around and their own laws are something they support (like maybe GDPR or showing a nipple) then it should be allowed. You can't have both.
You can have both. All large social media platforms have the technical capability to selectively block specific content in certain countries based on the user's location. They have been doing this for years. It's a necessity just to be allowed to continue operating in some countries.
While I agree that we don't want 'bunch of silicon valley liberals' moderating content, can we actually trust the government to censor instead?
Let's give one prominent example that occurred recently that affected hundreds of millions of people. In Australia, and around the world, our government authorities told us repeatably that the covid vaccines stopped you catching the virus and thus giving it to others [1], or at least significantly reduced the likelihood of doing so. It then came to light that Pfizer never tested for this during the trials and thus the authorities had no scientific evidence to say that this actually was the case. Infection rates amoungst highly vaccinated countries has also proven their position to be incorrect.
Yet anything on social media going against the authorities message at the time was flagged, removed and users accounts in some cases were banned.
What is considered misinformation one day can become 'fact' the next.
We should be careful on allowing any authority to censor our speech.
> In Australia, and around the world, our government authorities told us repeatably that the covid vaccines stopped you catching the virus and thus giving it to others [1], or at least significantly reduced the likelihood of doing so.
It did reduce spread for pre-omicron strains. And since the data for omicron showed this doesn't appear to be the case anymore they have stopped saying that.
>It then came to light that Pfizer never tested for this during the trials and thus the authorities had no scientific evidence to say that this actually was the case.
Pfizer never claimed it did in their original clinical trial documentation, neither did any government. When the vaccines began to be rolled out to the general population is when that was found, that when they started saying that. And remember here in Australia we got the vaccines late, so that data was available when we did.
Social media has been having problems enforcing censorship by different cultural standards for years. In America people are outraged if they see a nipple. In Europe, people are outraged when Facebook takes down a photo of a nursing mom. Let's not get started on political moderation in places like Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Instead of a bunch of silicon valley liberals pushing their perceived standards and values onto the rest of the world, build tools and delegate the task to the local authorities.
They don't like the content? They can spend the time to moderate and remove it themselves.