The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that's exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That's just one problem.
Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.
For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.
When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.
The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.
Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.
For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.
When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.
The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...