Steelman argument is it's better to know what liars, bigots, and other naughty people are up to than push them entirely underground. And someday future moderators may think you're naughty/lying/a quack/etc.
IMO we should not let private platforms become near monopolies, and certainly not without regulation, since they become a defacto public square. But if we're going to let them eat the world, then hopefully they'll at least use good judgment and measures like de-ranking or even banning folks who encourage others to do harm. Making bans temporary is a safety valve in case of bad moderation.
That steelman is still a pretty bad argument, though. I don't see why giving liars, bigots and other naughty people a megaphone is required in order to know what they're saying.
I suppose the argument there is that it's not necessarily a megaphone for the fella with 24 followers. The concern comes from when someone amasses a following through "acceptable" means and then pivots. Not sure how to balance that.
We can use objective metrics to tell if someone is a liar, a bigot, and a paid disinformant working for a foreign state.
... or we could have, 5-10 years ago. No matter what we call one of these people, no matter how true our findings are, if you accuse a bad person of a bad thing these days, they'll just accuse you of the same bad thing (no matter how little sense it makes) and they have so many stupid followers who will believe it, that being correct is no longer a winning strategy.
That’s just the thing. Your definition of an “objective metric” can be totally different than somebody else’s.
Biden’s definition of the objective truth is very different than Trump’s. It doesn’t matter what the actual truth is. Whoever’s in charge gets to decide what gets censored.
What is Youtube a 'near monopoly' in? Online video.....? Do you have any idea how much video there is online that's not on Youtube? They don't meet the legal definition of a monopoly
IMO we should not let private platforms become near monopolies, and certainly not without regulation, since they become a defacto public square. But if we're going to let them eat the world, then hopefully they'll at least use good judgment and measures like de-ranking or even banning folks who encourage others to do harm. Making bans temporary is a safety valve in case of bad moderation.