Power to the people.

As to "many cases where online communities document or facilitate crimes elsewhere", why criminalise the speech if the action is already criminalised?

That leaves only "Campaigns to harass individuals and groups". Why wouldn't moderation tools as powerful as the ones employed by Twitter's own moderators deal with that?

[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...

These are global platforms with global membership, simply stating that “if it is free speech in America it should be allowed” isn’t a workable concept.

When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads?

Of course. That is what they've demanded, so that is what they get.

> "When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. "

On the contrary: You must have this. As a matter of law. There is no alternative, other than withdrawing from those countries entirely and ignoring the issue of people accessing your site anyway (which is what happens in certain extreme situations, states under sanctions, etc)

> " It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads? "

Here are the options:

1) Do not do business in those countries.

2) Provide different services for those countries to reflect their legal requirements.

There is no way to provide a globally consistent experience because laws are often in mutual conflict (one state will for example prohibit discussion of homosexuality and another state will prohibit discriminating on the basis of sexual preference)

It's unhealthy to just throw every difficult problem at courts; the legal system is clumsy, unresponsive, and often tends to go to unwanted extremes due to a combination of technical ignorance, social frustration, and useless theatrics.

That is, it's not clear in the US you can ban something on the basis of it being immoral, you need to have the justification that it is "documentation of a crime".

This does not stop the FBI from being a major child porn distributor, despite that meaning the FBI is re-abusing thousands of victims under this rubric.

That's what makes it illegal? What if it's done on a private forum that the victim never finds out about? What if the victim is, say, dead? I don't think those change the legality.

As far as I understand in the EU private information is part of the self. Thus, manipulating, exchanging, dealing with private information without the person's consent is by itself a kind of aggression or violation of their rights. Even if the person never finds out.

In the USA however private information is an asset. The aggression or violation of right only happens when it actually damages the victim's finances. So if the victim never finds out about discussions happening somewhere else in the world, well… no harm done I guess?

Both views are a little extreme in my opinion, but the correct view (rights are only violated once the victim's own life has been affected in any way), is next to impossible to establish: in many cases the chain of events that can eventually affect a person's life is impossible to trace. Because of that I tend to suggest caution, and lean towards the EU side of the issue.

Especially if it's the documentation of a crime as heinous as child abuse.

That's something that I think is seriously wrong with the USA right now: the idea of an "arrest record", or at least the idea of it being accessible by anyone other than the police.

There are a number of situations where it is perfectly reasonable to arrest innocent people, then drop all charges. Let's say the cop arrive at a crime scene, there's a man on the ground lying in a pool of blood, and another man standing with a smoking gun holstered at their hip. Surely it would be reasonable to arrest the man that's still standing and confiscate their gun, at least for the time necessary to establish the facts?

But then once all charges has been cleared (say the dead guy had a knife and witnesses identify him as the aggressor), that arrest should be seen as nothing more as either a mistake or a necessary precaution. It's none of potential employer's business. In fact, I'd go as far as make it illegal to even ask for arrest records, or discriminate on that basis.

Criminal records of course are another matter.

Anime image boards are not in a hurry to expunge "lolicon" images because they don't face any consequence from having them.

I wouldn't blame Tumbler from banning ero images a few years back because ero image of real people are a lot of trouble. You have child porn, revenge porn, etc. Pornography produced by professionals has documentation about provenance (every performer showed somebody their driver's license, birth certificate, probably got issued a 1099) if this was applied to people posting images from the wild they would say people's privacy is being violated.

> Laws don't enforce themselves.

What has that got to do with Twitter? Please try to stay on track.

And protection of victim rights, I suppose.

The vast majority of removed comments are made to shape the conversations.

I think most people would be ok with letting admins remove illegal content, while allowing moderators shape content, as long as users could opt-in to seeing content the mods censored.

This is a win-win. If people don't want to see content they feel is offensive, they don't have to.

Let the user decide.

What you can enforce is "so and so says it is illegal" (accurate 90% or 99% or 99.9% of the time but not 100%) or some boundary that is so far away from illegal that you never have to use the ultimate truth procedure. The same approach works against civil lawsuits, boycotts and other pressure which can be brought to bear.

I think of a certain anime image board which contains content so offensive it can't even host ads for porn that stopped taking images of cosplayers or any real life people because it eliminated moderation problems that otherwise would be difficult.

There is also spam (should spam filters for email be banned because the violate the free speech of spammers?) and other forms of disingenuous communication. When you confront a troll inevitably they will make false comparisons (e.g. banning Kiwi Farms is like banning talk to the effect that trans women could damage the legitimacy of women's sports just when people are starting to watch women's sports)

On top of that there are other parties involved. That anime site I mention above has no ads and runs at very low cost but has sustainability problems because it used to sell memberships but got cut off by payment providers. You might be happy to read something many find offensive but an advertiser might not want to be seen next to it. The platform might want to do something charitable but hosting offensive talk isn't it.

I submit that spam filters should be under the sole control of their end users. If I'm using a Yahoo or Gmail account (I'm not) I should have the option to disable the spam filter entirely, or to only use personal parameters that are trained on the mail only I received, and not email should ever be summarily blackholed without letting me know in some way. If an email bounces, the sender should know. If it's just filtered, it should be in the recipient's spam folder.

This part is not correct. Private companies block what they believe to be illegal activities in their systems constantly - in order to limit the legal liability of being an accomplice to a crime. This is the case in all industries - and is standard practice from banking, to travel, to hotels, to retail... it's commonplace for companies to block services.

For spam, I would recommend that it gets a separate filter-flag allowing users to toggle it and see spam content, separately toggled from moderated content.

This is what HN does with "showdead".

It all comes down to some guy telling me how to talk. I don't like it. Anybody who likes it has rocks in his head.

What you want is someone else's audience, and I'm not exactly sure what makes you think you have the right to that?

Since I was not born with a language, yes I've been told how to talk for a sizeable portion of my life.

In fact learning things like tact and politeness, especially as it relates to the society I live in, has been monumental in my success.

Do you go to your parents house and tell them to screw off? Do you go to work and open your mouth like a raging dumpster fire? Do you have no filter talking to your husband/wife/significant other? Simply put your addition to the discussion is that of an impudent child. "I want everything and I want to give up nothing" is how an individual becomes an outcast, and I severely doubt this is how you actually live outside the magical place known as the internet, though I may be surprised.

What "godlike power" are you referring to? The ability to moderate what turns up in your own social media feed? The ability to respond to comments someone else has deemed to break rules. I would hope for a bit more than that for godlike power.

I may be unique in this regard, but I am aware of the fact that sometimes I make mistakes, and I don’t highly value all of my conversation, sometimes I just rant, or enjoy engaging in more superfluous conversation. Sometimes the best conversations aren’t “highly valuable”!

Oops.

Nobody is "telling you how to talk." People are free to choose their terms for voluntary social interactions. You don't have a right to inflict yourself on others who wish not to interact with you.

I'll give up some of my freedom, to limit everyone else's freedom every day of the week - the only concern I have is roughly the IQ of the people doing the limiting.

https://hn.algolia.com/help

https://hn.algolia.com/settings

dang often references past discussions with search links, so here's a good starting point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=7&prefix=true&que...

On second thought.. I suppose that's Tiktok.

So you want a moderator to moderate. but then you also want to have tools to see what has been moderated away and unlock those? Right? So moderate yes, but also unmoderate by the users.

Power to the people!

Mods exist and can ban/lock/block people and content but users can see everything that was banned, removed or locked, as well as the reason why; what policy did the user violate?

I think the only exception would be actually illegal content; that should be removed entirely, but maybe keep a note from the mods in its place stating "illegal content".

That way users can actually scrutinise what the mods do and one doesn't wonder whether or not the mods removed a post because they are biased or for ligit reasons, and opinions are not entirely removed, as they are still readable, but you can't respond to them

In addition crap floods? If I submit half a billion posts do you really want that handled by moderation?

Being a server operator I've seen how bad the internet actually sucks, this may be something the user base does not have to experience directly. When 99.9% of incoming attempts are dropped or ban listed you start to learn how big the problem can be.

Spam may still leak into our inboxes today, but the level of user control over email spam is generally a stable equilibrium, the level of outrage around spam filters — and to be clear, there are arguments to be made that spam filters are increasingly biased — is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship".

As to moderation, why not be able to filter by several factors, like "confidence level this account is a spammer"? Or perhaps "limit tweets to X number per account", or "filter by chattiness". I have some accounts I follow (not on Twitter, I haven't used it logged in in years) that post a lot, I wish I could turn down the volume, so to speak.

What is spam... exactly? Especially when it comes to a 'generalized' forum. I mean would talking about Kanye be spam or not? It's this way with all celebrities, talking about them increases engagement and drives new business.

Are influencers advertising?

Confidence systems commonly fail across large generalized populations with focused subpopulations. Said subpopulations tend to be adversely affected by moderation because their use of communication differs from the generalized form.

No.

> Are influencers advertising?

That spam is advertising does not make all advertising spam.

We already have filters based on confidence for spam via email, with user feedback involvement too, so I don't need to define it, users of the service can define it for me.

The company that provides the service defines the moderation because the company pays for the servers. If you start posting 'bullshit' that doesn't eventually pay for the servers and/or drives users away money will be the moderator. There is no magic free servers out there in the world capable of unlimited space and processing power.

Who would be put upon by this? The average user doesn't have to be, they could use the default settings which are very anodyne. The rest of us get what we want, that's what the article stated. Who's finding this a burden?

As to the reality of things, Twitter's just been bought for billions and there's plenty of bullshit being posted there. That's the reality, and several people who've made a lot of money by working out how to balance value and costs think it can do better.

My apologies.

> So you want a moderator to moderate.

I don't care whether they continue to moderate centrally but it would suit those who do.

> but then you also want to have tools

Yes.

> to see what has been moderated away and unlock those?

Yes.

If an app you download has settings but they are either:

a) only available to the developers or company

b) the defaults always override your settings

would you be happy? Why, you might ask, do you not get access to the settings and to set them as you wish?

Contextual filters/scanners would score a piece of content, give it a "score" based on what ever categorizations are being filtered (NSFW, Non-Inclusive Lang, Slurs, Disinfo, etc)

Then both the creator and the consumer should be able to see the score in transparent manner, with the consumer being able to set a threshold to filter out any post that is higher then what they choose

Free Speech Absolutist could set it to 0, Default could be 50, and go from there

Scores across a range of measures would be best, in my view.

Instead of just leaving it to users or admins to block users or servers they didn’t want to deal with, a large subset decided to block for anyone who didn’t block certain other servers.

>> Give me the tools that the moderators have

Whatever tools a site like twitter or youtube gives you, (A) most people will never use them and (B) they still control how the tools work. These two are enough to achieve any censorship goal you might have, and enough to make censorship inevitable.

I don't think we get power to the people while Alphabet/Elon/Whatnot own the platform. It's a shame that FOSS failed on these fronts. But, the internet has produced powerful proofs of concept. The WWW itself, for the first 20 years. Wikipedia. Linux/gnu. Those really did give power to the people, and you can see how much better they were at dealing with censorship, disinformation and other 2020s infopolitics.

Wikipedia have a model for user generated content. It's much more resilient, open, unbiased and successful than social media. This isn't because they have some super nuanced, single-us distinction between moderation and censorship. They never really needed to split that hair.

They have a model for collaboratively editing an encyclopedia, including lots of details and special cases that deal with disagreement, discontent and ideological battlegrounds.

They also have a different organisational and power structure. Wikipedia doesn't exist to sell ads, or some other purpose above the creation of an encyclopedia. Users/editors have a lot of power. Things happen in the open.

Between those two, they've done much better than Alphabet/FB/Twitter/etc. Wikipedia is the ultimate prize for censorship, narrative wars, disinformation, campaigning, activism and such. Despite this, and despite far fewer resources it outperforms the commercial platforms. I don't think it's a coincidence.

I also get a bit tired of looking someone up and it has "so and so says this person is <insert bad thing>", claims that usually stack up about as well as that SPLC claim against Maajid Nawaz[1] did.

Given this, I find it hard to see how they're doing better than the other companies you mention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majid_Nawaz#Claim_by_Southern_...

Don't trivialize it as some personal preference around moods. It's much more than that.

Stuff like death threats, doxxing, child porn, harassment are not just "moods you don't like".

That is the wrong view on a global communication platform. It's like saying "a certain tone sets the mood for the entire telephone system".

These things should be seen more as silos, subcultures or whatever.

Unless you expose yourself to the firehose of globally popular content.

Anyway, analogies are imperfect, please look in the direction where I am gesturing, not at my exact words.

The point here (and of the entire conversation) is that you shouldn't judge a medium by its worst imaginable actors as long as you're given the right tools that allow you to use that medium undisturbed, effectively putting them into a different silo. Today twitter allows a very crude, imperfect approximation of this by following people that post decent content and setting the homepage to "latest posts" instead of "top tweets". Ideally we'd have better tools than that.

If moderation must be done then let me do it for myself. Give me the tools.

A central moderating authority cannot be trusted at all.

If they started removing low-emotion information and discussions that just didn't fit the Bogleheads philosophy, I think that would cross the line into censorship.

Anyway, it's clear that the Bogleheads forum model is the polar opposite of where Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have gone to suck in the masses and increase their engagement by highlighting the most heated stuff and throwing gasoline onto the fire with likes, votes, and retweets. I think the mainstream social media companies have put themselves into a bind with this.

Maybe moderation is part of that, but I’d argue the subject matter is already generally less polarizing/toxic than what’s on the other three platforms.

But your point is still valid re: how Bogleheads does moderation.

What's obviously very hard is allowing discussion of politics, macroeconomics, religion, race, etc. without it getting heated. Bogleheads doesn't even try.

I highly doubt it.

I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.

That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.

That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…

There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.

http://www.eternal-september.org/

(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:

https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html )

Also found https://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/NoSpam.html which is a great little time capsule site..

Social media keep using this excuse for not trying. We can moderate spam in emails with a simple naive bayes classifier, why don't we just do that with comments? It could easily classify comments that are part of a bandwagon and flag them automaticly hiding them or for human review.

We are able to moderate email but the concepts we use to do so are never applied to comments, I don't know why, this seems like a solved problem.

In SMTP servers I've managed for clients we typically block anywhere from 80 to 99.999% (yes 10000 blocked to one success) messages. I'd call that MegaModeration if there was such a term.

And if you think email spam is solved then I don't believe you read HN often as there is a common complaint of "Gmail is blocking anything I send, I'm a low volume non-commercial sender"

In addition email filtering is extremely slow to react to new methods, generally taking hours depending on the reporting system.

Lastly, you've not thought about the problem much. How are you going to rapidly detect the difference between a fun meme that spreads virally versus an attack against an individual. Far more often you're going to be blocking something that's not a bad thing.

I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.

I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.

[1] https://demos.co.uk/press-release/staggering-scale-of-social...

Spam filters are probably one of the single most consistently unreliable pieces of software I ever have to use; regardless of the email provider; or email client I use.

I have to check my junk folder like it’s my inbox.

On both Apple Mail and Outlook; with two different emails - email money transfers (EMTs) will get shoved in my junk box; despite the dozens of times I have marked said emails as not junk.

I’ll get spam emails, but I don’t get mail from newsletters I’ve actually signed up for.

Like…if you’re trying to use spam emails as an example of success; and even a model we should follow for…anything else; I’m going to laugh you out of the room and tell you to keep me the hell away from whatever tools you want to use with that technology.

Spam filtering software for email is at best useless; at its worst; mind numbing log frustrating. It’s a tool I’ll never trust.

This is also the approach celebrities in general need to take as they get drowned in messages (elon musk could spend 24/7 reading messages sent to him and read only a tiny fraction), so harassment can probably be solved by whatever solution we come up with for celebs.

Can make some fairly elaborate "allow" rules depending on why you might want to read messages from non-contacts like "this person is a contact of a contact" or "this person has "IT" in their Twitter bio or "this person is on the 'good person' white list that Mr. Whitelist maintains for the community".

People don't really have "conversations" on social media. Most activity is posting updates about oneself, but the far bigger part is screaming at each other and playing engagement games.

The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded.

As such, Twitter is opposite to real life. If you'd talk and behave as people do on Twitter in the real world, you'd be ousted in a day or may even wake up in the hospital.

In a dynamic where bad faith is the default, you can't apply good faith principles.

It's massively complex to address. On the one hand, you have almost no accountability regarding your speech on Twitter, yet incidentally too much: mob attacks / cancel culture. Too free and too restricted at once.

Personally, I think what you can and cannot say is a massive distraction from the real issue: what gets amplified. Reasonable conversation is pointless and hot takes win. It should be the opposite, just like in real life.

> The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded.

> the real issue: what gets amplified

But it can be (at least partially) fixed if you change the optimization function.

I advocate for that here: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank...

And Twitter's Birdwatch (that Elon recently got all excited about when it fact checked the White House: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1587884806020415491) actually does this "bridging-based ranking" for adding context on tweets.

Here's the paper with details on how it works for Birdwatch: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap... (you can also check out the source code in that repo).

Our concepts of free speech, censorship and moderation are simply outdated on modern social media - when you have systems designed to encourage and spread low-effort, novel, emotional and manipulative content (e.g. twitter), no amount of "tweaks" to such systems can fix the problem.

Instead of trying to fix systems originally designed for marketing, why not actually design systems meant for disseminating and checking information from the ground up? I bet that would look way different compared to twitter or facebook.

It doesn't have to involve moderation or censorship - it could just mean giving disproporitonately more powerful voice to experts willing to explain disinformation, for example (rather than having their voice drown in the retweet popularity contest).

Hilariously enough, this is what people said about the invention of both writing and the printing press.

I have no doubt we can do better, if we actually tried to build social media with the right tools and incentives.

TV, film, radio, and comic books, too.

(I didn't down vote him, BTW. His comment is relevant)

I disagree wholeheartedly. These concepts are now more important than ever in human history.

We could (and should) demand better.

There's a solution for this, based on prediction markets. Essentially experts make "bets" on various things and are rewarded for correct predictions. The more correct predictions they make, they more "points" they have to get their viewpoints broadcast. And conversely, quacks and charlatans that cannot model the world scientifically make few accurate predictions and get drowned out.

Also, how many times have markets been severely manipulated?

This is the natural state anyway because most people are idiots about most things.

I'd be willing to bet that if you could somehow run an experiment in parallel where you had one Reddit with real bans, and one with soft bans, the quality and nature of interactions on the soft ban one would be much, much worse even outside of banned communities.

Reddit, itself, is, or at least used to be, a variety of diverse communities. I don't care about either /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/FatPeopleLove I don't consider myself a part of those communities. I subscribe to subreddits I want to track, and I am not a member of the ones that I don't.

Surely people on the disagreeable side of the psychological spectrum will gravitate towards some communities and people on the opposite side of that spectrum will gravitate towards other communities. Some communities are cross-cutting, and so have to be moderated in a different way altogether (which Reddit already accommodates). Other than that, communities have their own social protocols. Creating blanket rules / bans / restrictions across communities restricts the organic nature of human interaction and hamstrings it in a rather depressing way.

Many problems arise in the battle for "front page" or "trending" screens that try to blend content from multiple communities and invite competition or "raids" or what have you from opposing sides. Personally I hate such things, I have no desire to be manipulated by them and use browser extensions to block them. But given that they exist, it's again mainly a moderation / preferences problem. Give the control to the user over what they want to see.

In my experience, this depends on the community size.

In a small community, "platforming" assholes (rather than "deplatforming" them) may act to retain the assholes as users (where they would otherwise leave for lack of platform); and then those asshole-users, since they're already there, may also interact in other, non-quarantined subforums on the site — to other users' detriment.

In a large community (society, really), e.g. Reddit or Twitter, the asshole-users are going to stick around either way, since people have multiple interests, and the site likely already gives them many other things they want besides just "a plaform to talk about their asshole opinions on." They weren't there primarily to be assholes; they just are assholes, but are going to stick around either way.

So, for large sites, the only real decision you're making by quarantining vs banning a certain sub-community that's full of assholes (rather than doing active moderation of certain discussion topics, regardless of where they occur) is whether the asshole-users' conversations mostly end up occurring in the quarantined forum, or spread out across the rest of the site where they can't be hidden.

It's a bit like prostitution regulation. Prostitution is going to happen in a city no matter what; it's just a question of whether such activity is "legible" or "illegible" to city government. Some cities choose to have an explicitly-designated red-light district and licensing for sex workers; these cities at least ensure that any activity associated with prostitution — e.g. human trafficking, gang violence, etc — occurs mostly within that district, where police presence can be focused. Most cities, though, choose to "protect their image" by having no such district. This option does not result in less prostitution; it only hides it throughout the city, making police investigation of crimes related to sex work much less likely to be reported, and much more difficult to investigate.

When asked why, the first reason is he uses Substack and they don't offer this as a feature, and when he was on his own self-hosted site, he didn't have the technical skill to implement it himself. But then he says that even if he could, he wouldn't, because he wants his community to reflect a certain ethos and character that creates a community he actually wants to be a part of.

How he doesn't see the contradiction here, I don't know. But this gets at the core of the issue. Virtually nobody actually wants a free-for-all, even one that is opt-in. But whereas some blogger with a devoted following is allowed the freedom to cultivate his garden, as he has described it in the past, when you get as big as Twitter, the larger public starts to feel like it's their community and they should get to decide, not the owners, or that it's even so big as to be this "de facto public square" people keep calling it, and now it has to just follow the same rules as a government, even though it is a private platform owned by people with their own preferences for what they think the character of the platform should be.

The only fairly large platform I can ever think of that really did adopt the more or less anything that won't get us shut down by the FBI is fair game policy is 4Chan. But if everyone who is so hung up on Twitter being too restrictive is mad about Twitter's policies, 4Chan still exists. Why not just go there? You can't even say it doesn't have reach. There are plenty of users there. Meaningful real world movements have started there. The only thing you lose is the real news doesn't follow and write about 4Chan nearly as much as they do Twitter.

This is sort of talking around an argument. You could say the same thing about a subreddit dedicated to re-electing a local alderman because of his policy on the maintenance of public parks. Speech is meant to inform, or to affect change.

The question is whether you're going to use an online annoyance argument to moderate controversy on a platform. If the justification for why you're going to moderate speech is that people who are not annoyed by that speech might react to it, you've moved squarely into making "genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear."

My point is that the actions he categorizes as "moderation" are in fact not sufficient to achieve the goal. Thus, even a platform who is purely concerned with providing a service will need to undertake actions he categorizes as "censorship" (or at least would have to come up with some unknown new system of moderation, since the one he proposes is insufficient).

I personally opt in to see all the flagged/dead comments. I would say 1-5% of them are mysteries as to why they are dead (meaning they have been automatically killed, not killed due to other users flagging).

But then the ones that deserve to be killed/banned are so, so egregious.

It’s just unfortunate that there will always be innocent people that get roped in with automatic moderation.

Some of these are people who have been shadowbanned, you can check by looking at all their comments in their profile and if they're shadowbanned (almost) all of them will be dead.

As a former die hard member of [R]age Board for the Elites, I remember the use of the N-word being so prolific a moderator changed it to display “ice cream” with no work around. Seeing a post suddenly pop up calling somebody a stupid ice cream was hilarious.

I was a teenager in the wild days and Chan doesn’t disturb me even, I just don’t go there. Borderland Beat is real enough.

As an adult I feel that the ban hammer is an absolute necessity.

More than likely shadowbanned accounts. Some green accounts also seem to be automatically [dead] until they get couch’s, but I’m not sure the exact situations around that.

If I don't want to see profanity, I should be able to set my filter to exclude profane comments. If I don't want to see nudity, I can set that filter too. Just like movies get a certain rating (G, PG, R, etc.), we should be able to properly label data.

This is basically what he describes in the article as a form of moderation: "If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a bunch of filters - harassing content, sexually explicit content, conspiracy theories - and let people toggle which ones they wanted to see vs. avoid."

If your concern is with the labels themselves being used to convey a (possibly offensive) message, I think you could just have a way for people to hide specific labels and never see them again. Or maybe a way to label the labels as subjective, or just delete ones that are obvious flamebait.

People love to misuse tools meant for good, on Reddit I've been on the receiving end of the "reddit cares" self-harm notification because of some barely spicy comments.

Which inspires another really weird, super uncomfortable thought. If the CSAM producers had cheap, reliable methods of creating their awful content without the use of real people, would that reduce the harm done?

I can't remember the last time I felt so conflicted just asking a question, but there it is.

The article's distinction between moderation and censorship feels like the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist - i.e. if you are sympathetic to their cause you use the more positive euphamism, but there really isn't an objective difference.

At most the distinction the article seems to be making is that moderation should be optional and censorship forced - you should be able to choose to see the dead comments if you want (nevermind that that is hardly the norm for "moderation" on the internet).

All i can think, is under that distinction, the mccarthyism in the US would probably be considered "moderation" not "censorship" despite probably being one of the most egregious examples of censorship in usa in the modern era. So i have trouble accepting that definition.

I don't think this is the correct distinction he is making. He defines moderation as a receiver being able to choose whether they want to see certain content. He defines censorship as a third-party deciding if a receiver can see certain content whether or not they want it. McCarthyism would be censorship under that definition.

Both moderation and censorship have the outcome of reducing what information parties are allowed to communicate, and a system is its inputs and outputs, thus they are the same thing.

This isn’t to say that it’s bad or good. The rhetoric of moderation is perceived better than censorship, but this is like the cops calling your interrogation an interview; it doesn’t actually change what’s happening.

Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation. Deleting a comment because you don't like it, it doesn't conform to your views or you find it outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake is censorship.

Your comment brings this out because some subset of "outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake" is right on the cusp, and making those calls (to moderate or not to moderate?) puts tremendous pressure on one's own feelings and beliefs. What helps one do it neutrally is self-awareness, but that is the scarcest thing there is. It takes a decade of hard work to distill a bit more. (Edit: and I'm not claiming to have much; just that it's needed.)

I'm uncomfortable with the "false" / "fake" end of your spectrum because we don't have a truth meter. Who am I to decide what's true or false or "mis" or "dis" for anybody else? I'm not taking on that karma.

"Inflammatory" is easier to work with because it's about predictable community effects and one can moderate for community cohesion. Moderating that way ends up excluding truths that the community can't withstand, but such truths probably exist for any community. Groups may even be defined by what they exclude. We can try to stretch those limits but there's only so much elasticity available.

I blanched when I read "Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product" in the OP, but actually that's basically saying moderation is about community cohesion and I can't disagree. But the secret agenda, on HN at least, is to stretch it.

Well, in very small doses numbers help. It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.

Which means that the sensible thing to do is to form a committee of intelligent people with good incentives, then go trustingly with what they suggest. Which is, coincidentally, a successful model that governments use. All the politics is generally a distraction from the real work being done by committees.

I agree, but that's not self-awareness—that's seeing other people's blind spots, which is much easier, in fact it happens automatically.

You're right that it falls apart at scale. Somehow mass blind spots take over. Can that be mitigated? That is the question.

Group dynamics seem to change qualitatively at each order of magnitude. Maybe the problem of "social media", i.e. internet group dynamics, is that we're dealing with orders of magnitude we've never seen before. That doesn't get worked out in just 10 or 20 years.

At the same time the hive mind is quite often a protective defense against insurgency in forms.

This seems to be a problem with the comments in this entire post. We're taking community as individuals doing individual things, and in small forums this is commonly true. But, when the group grows larger and money is on the line that assumption should be discarded. In astro-turfing for example, a seemingly large group of 'users' will direct communication on your forms via somewhat 'rational' communication, but possibly disliked by a lot of members. Then you'll notice a group that seemingly counters the astroturf to the level of absurdity that turns more 'hearts and minds' towards the astroturfers (guess what, the counter turfers were also the astroturfers).

You typically end up with one of two situations. The forum either takes on the ideas of the astroturf group and it becomes encoded in their ideals, or the fend it off, but in doing so embrace some of the extremism implanted by the astroturfing group in the first place.

Also, what happens to any group when 4chan decides to raid you for the lulz?

...Is it? I mean, compared to Twitter, sure, but for a private forum I think of it as relatively large.

HN feels mid-size in a good way. Most forums are a lot smaller, and then there are the few famous ones that are much much larger. There aren't that many in HN's order of magnitude. The mid range is a nice place to hang because although the problems are impossible, they're not utterly impossible. You can work with them around the margins.

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

Make a post about celebrities, politics, or religion (that's not tech related) and see how long before it's flagged out of existence.

Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.

Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.

Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).

But still, if the Hunter Biden laptop story were removed from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, from StackOverflow and from LWN.net (entire platforms), I wouldn't accuse these particular platforms of censorship.

I can't help but think this comes down to, its censorship if i disagree, moderation when i agree.

If someone posts something like "Elon Musk is an idiot", would deleting it be censorship or moderation? Musk is a person after all, but i suspect that many people would say deleting such a thing is censorship.

To give a more realistic to hacker news example - if there was a story about some company reselling modified GPL software for profit without following the gpl license, i would probably call them "bad" people. This is clearly an insult. I still think it would be a reasonable comment to make (hopefully a bit more fleshed out then just calling them evil of course).

Moderators will delete comments or ban people for insults against people they like/support, but then cheer on more aggressive insults against people they deem bad (it's suddenly become very trendy to lash out at Elon Musk on Reddit, for example - you'll score upvotes rather than subreddit bans for doing that)

Back in the day we might have a forum or a number of forums on a topic. Let's say it's Nascar Forums or whatever. I might not like the opinions of the moderators and that'd be that, I'd leave the site. I'd recognize that it's not reflective of the wider world.

Somehow Twitter and Reddit and various other social networks don't feel like that. I feel quite often that some subset people around me take opinions from Twitter etc. as being reflective of mainstream thought. When really it's still just a tiny microcosm of humanity.

I don't really use them any more, but I still have the sense that all sorts of social movements and bizarre (from my perspective) opinions and value frameworks are being born and spread there.

More and more often I find myself in conversations with people and suddenly I feel like I'm reading a reddit or twitter thread, and I'll see the conversation follow an exact path that I've seen before, only now in real life.

It's a really strange feeling as someone who has been reading people's opinions on the internet for what feels like forever, and just recently seeing those opinions show up in everyday conversations with people I've known all this time.

Edit: It's especially jarring when you see these people say things like "in my opinion" or "i think", because now I start to wonder "do you really? Or did you just see somebody else say that?" Not that all my thoughts are original, but I don't take credit for things like that.

The reason why moderation exists on sites like Twitter / Facebook is due to: 1. Laws (e.g. child porn, abuse, harassment, illegal speech like Tiananmen square in China). 2. Advertisers - the real customers. 3. Public opinion

In that order, with a pretty big gap between #2 and #3. Don't comply with laws? Out of business tomorrow. Don't do what advertisers want? Out of business this year. Don't do what the general public wants? Maybe out of business in a few years, maybe not, it depends.

The methods proposed in this post are great for dealing with issues around public opinion, but do very little to appease governments or advertisers.

Moderators were initially tasked with keeping threads on topic, enforcing predefined community standards, and parsing irrelevant detractors.

Dark patterns are now mostly just used to manipulate people, and attenuate conduct to fall into line with group think biases. This policy drives up engagement, traffic, and profits.

Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)

That is a rather naive slogan to be repeating in 2022.

Once your servers become the de facto public square, we absolutely get to complain. Not even talking about how your server is running on top of a huge amount of infrastructure that was created by our society, enabled by principles and laws that have been discovered and refined across generations. Your server does not exist in a vacuum.

Democracy requires a healthy public square to survive and thrive, and that is more important than some overly simplistic notion of private property.

Twitter ? It's far from a public square, even in the US (outside of the US it barely exists)

Also, if an online public square is a pre requisite for democracy: it should be a public utility, not something owned by a company who's incentive are diametrically opposed to the interests of the users

I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about.

Big claim...

Look at the stats, how can it be a democracy pre requisite and a public square when not even 10% of your country's population is on it ? (and probably 30% of these are bots, and another 30% are inactive)

It's an online bubble of polarised people looking for attention, not a public square and not representative of anything

I find that people who write things like this are expressing a distaste for politics taking place on Twitter. They tend to be expressing how they think things should be, and I can even sympathize, but that has no bearing on how things are.

How things actually are: the vast majority of politicians of any importance in the west (and probably not only) have staff dedicated to maintaining their Twitter presence. Most institutions use Twitter as an important communication channel, including the various institution the make up the EU, the USA and the UN. You can check this for yourself. If you actually talk with journalists, you will understand that Twitter is now central to everything they do, and that trickles down to everyone else.

10% is actually a huge number. The majority of people do not have a public voice nor an interest in actively participating in politics. Politics is made of "polarised people looking for attention". Always has been.

You have to be living under a rock to not be aware of all the major geopolitical incidents that take place on Twitter. It was the main communication channel for Donald Trump. We just recently witnessed the incident between Musk and Zelenskyy. A lot of interactions happened there during Brexit. I could go on, and on, and on.

It's not a public square of constructive discussion, it's a public square in which everyone, most of them being absolutely incompetent/uneducated in the subject, has a megaphone and screams their version of reality

Outside the US this problem typically gets even worse. For one, why is your country depending on a (generally) US company for its freedom of speech? And two, outside the US freedom of speech laws are typically significantly different than the US model.

So use legislation to tackle that problem. You're admitting it's not really a free speech issue.

In fact there is already some amount of legislation on this, for example in the EU.

This kind of comment always runs afoul of reality. Moderated discussion is the rule and not the exception because it works. It results in more desirable content that attracts more users. Parler and Gab and Truth[1] couldn't beat Twitter; 4chan couldn't beat reddit, 8kun couldn't even beat 4chan. Going back farther, USENET was fundamentally unmoderatable by design, and it drowned itself in a torrent of spam.

The less moderation, the less utility. Everywhere.

70k users migrating to Mastodon in 1 week is interesting. However, I do respect your opinions.

Have a wonderful day, and here is an up-vote... =)

Yeah this worked 20+ years ago but it doesn't work now.

There are a small handful of monopolies of places to go on the internet. You are basically suggesting "well make your own forum and then you can control it!". Come on, you know that doesn't make any sense in this day and age.

>Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)

I've also found people who think they are smart but really don't know what they are talking about because they are living in a complete bubble and ignoring reality tend to end their posts with smiley faces.

Nice. ;)

Before getting too caught up in off topic straw-men, you may want to look at why 70k users joined Mastodon in the past 7 days.

Have a fantastic day, and here is your up-vote... and a Commodore logo since smiles may upset you. (=

Look at you, trying to act like the internet is not centralized these days.

Get back to me in a few weeks when no one is using what ever the heck Mastodon is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBCYvoC4muc&t=90s

Second: is this about freedom of speech? If it is, say so, because moderation nor censorship exclusively define that. Muddying the debate by giving some weird definition of two concepts isn't going to help that.

But freedom of speech is not neatly defined by (the negation of) the definition of censorship, or moderation, either the one from the dictionary or the one from the blog post. It's a term that (in the USA) is defined by law and jurisprudence, and is open to some debate, and in other places is just missing and use losely in debates about reform.

If the author wants to use his/her definitions to state a position in one of those debates, fine, but say so.

So we get lots of local definitions of censorship and moderation depending on the flavour of views the writer wants to present. They all tend to be reasonable in context but mean everyone is talking passed one another.

Essentially everyone is trying to argue over the ground of what moderation should be so it doesn’t get lumped into the “evil” censorship. But because this is largely just opinion everyone tries to make theirs look more official and factual.

In reality, freedom of speech is a principle that is more or less well-defined, and that is more or less codified into law in certain countries (the first ammendment to the US Constitution being the most famous example, but many countries have similar, though more limited, rights).

Viewed as a principle, it not only applies to the relationship between the individual and the government, it can be applied to all human groups. We can say that WeChat is worse for freedom of speech than Facebook, even though both are private enterprises and are not within the scope of any freedom of speech laws in most jurisdictions.

The reasons why freedom of speech is viewed as a virtue, at least in European-inspired thought, is not exclusively related to the relationship between the citizen and the state - it is about ensuring good ideas are heard even if that means bad ones are heard as well, ensuring that unpopular bad ideas of powerful people (within some group) can be challenged by the majority of the group, ensuring that minorities who are harmed by some decision get a chance to let everyone else in the group know about the harm.

These apply just as much to you vs the state as they apply to you vs your local church, your village, your tribe, your gaming clan, your company etc. For various reasons, each of these groups may decide that these reasons are not as important as others, while still wishing for some amount of freedom of speech (for example, a church will often not tolerate obvious blasphemy, but may still tolerate criticism of the church leaders, or vigorous discussion of the implications of scripture).

So, I am well within my rights to complain that my state or my company or my church or HN doesn't encourage freedom of speech enough, even though none of these institutions is bound by the freedom of speech clause of the US constitution. Also, I can even claim that the US constitution itself, or the SC interpretation of it, doesn't respect freedom of speech enough if I were to disagree with any decision on the matter - the principle of freedom of speech is separate from the US law.

I'm not an US citizen, and it applies to where I live as well, so there's that.

Within your framework, I agree with your views and conclusion though. My post was intentionally targeted as legalistic point of view, but I agree that this can be generalized.

I can see Social Media CEO saying "well, I believe in free expression and I would otherwise want to allow this message, but I'm worried what the government will do to me if I do allow it. So instead I will block it."

When a platform blocks some content, some call it "censorship", while others say "hey, it's a private company and they can block what they want to. It's called 'moderation'" - but this may in fact not be something the platform wants to block - it's indirect government censorship.

I wonder how Elon will handle this. Will he be cowed by the government into censoring content they don't like? Or will he ignore them and take his chances?

"Specific Person is a real jerk! And they probably eat live frogs for fun too! What a loser!" - As long as Specific Person can effectively ignore this - meaning it's not forced into their feed, overwhelming their inbox, etc - then that's probably fine, even if untrue.

"Specific Person might live near XYZ. Definitely DON'T put any turds in their mailbox ;-) " - Pretty clearly an invitation to real-world harassment, which is not okay and should not be abetted by any platform.

Your speech is effectively censored by the moderators because you cannot use that tool as intended, to reach audiences with the same ease other types of speech can.

It's like requiring a newspaper to "moderate" all articles by a certain author publishing them in the form of a short notice "If you are interested in the writings of Mr. Smith, who may or may have not published an article for today's issue, then please send a self-addressed enevelope to PO-Box ....".

But you can still stand outside your home and say whatever you want. You can print up and distribute flyers. You can set up your own web site too.

While I despise the business models and actions of pretty much all the "social" media actors, they are not required to provide you with a platform.

You can still say whatever it is you want to say, but those private actors have no responsibility to act as a megaphone for you.

This dichotomy (free speech for all, but no one is required to offer a platform) works in liberal societies because you have a diversity of publishers.

You can't come to my house, sit on my couch, eat my food and watch my television unless I say you can. If you try to do so without my permission, I'm within my rights to throw you out and, if you resist, use force to remove you.

How is usage of a private company's private server resources any different?

Exactly. And no one. Zero people. No person or entity is required to provide you with a platform, megaphone or audience.

That doesn't stop you from saying what you want. Freedom to express yourself does not entitle you to an audience. Full stop.

Edit: To clarify, your free speech rights do not trump my free speech (which includes not hosting your speech on my private property). Yes, today's social media has inordinate influence due to network effects. But those are for-profit corporations who owe you nothing.

Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.

Personally, I despise those corporations. And I voted with my feet and wallet and left nearly a decade ago. But my distaste for them and their business models doesn't trump their free speech and property rights. Nor should it.

Your rights do not supersede those of others, except on your private property. Facebook's (or Twitter or YouTube, etc., etc., etc,.) servers are their private property.

Want a public square? Then set up a public square. Those corporate, for-profit entities are not that.

If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...

>If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...

Abrasive or not, it's not a tangent. It's the central point.

I didn't disregard anything -- rather, I didn't address the tangent you were off on.

Yes, censorship is bad. There. I addressed your tangent.

However, mine is not an extremist position at all. Freedom of expression and property rights are core elements of Western civilization.

Clearly, we're talking past each other. Which is too bad.

But I'll restate my main thesis once more: You can say whatever you want. But you are not entitled to an audience. And here's the proof.

So let's look at what happened in reality. Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole.

The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship.

I also think that this article completely mischaracterizes what the free speech side of the debate want.

No, it really isn't.

Differences:

1) Reddit is super ban happy, and there is no way to view banned content. Ban reasons include slurs, political opinions, as well as no reasons at all.

2) Subreddits are not filters over the same content, they have (mostly) different content.

3) There is a fractal abundance of user-moderated subreddit; yes, there is some bad culture in some of them. This is not what ACX is proposing. He is proposing 2-20 filters, ran by the company, not by volunteers, with a specific purpose and clearly defined.

I really don't see how ACX's proposal can cause illegal behavior or harassment that is not already there.

You're making a false equivalence with reddit, then pointing out reddit has negative emergent properties.

"Reddit has a paid team called Anti-Evil Operations (part of the "Trust" & "Safety" team) which goes around permanently banning accounts for saying bad words. We made automod block them so you don't lose your account for saying a word and getting reported. It's not our rule, it's the entire website now, we're just trying to look out for our people. Sorry."

And also, whether they're justified or not, it doesn't really matter to he point. ACX's proposal =/= subreddits.

Fresh ideas are always welcome, but the people who are trying to maintain working forums have been at the process for a long time now and can draw on experience all the way back to the BBS days.

I don't disagree with your point, there's quite a bit of knowledge around building communities and moderation that's been around and honed for at least a generation. And we should take that knowledge and build on and around it.

That said, folks have been going on about "Eternal September" for decades. Granted, people are born all the time, but they've grown up in the age of the Internet.

As such, it seems to me that at some point (if not now, when?) we need to get away from that particular excuse.

Anyone born before the Internet (myself included) has had a long time to figure things out, and anyone born in the Internet's wake is immersed in it from a fairly young age.

So why do we continue to use "Eternal September" as a foil?

It's entirely possible I'm missing something important, and if I am, please do enlighten me. Thanks!

It's a fun example because of how wrong Hollywood (and intuition) gets this one. You're on an elevator and an evil terrorist cuts the cables! Oh no! What happens next!? Not much, besides you being annoyed at probably being stuck somewhere in between floors. People had to be persuaded that the technology was safe and so Elisha Otis' [1] regular demonstrations of his safety stopping invention is a big part of the reason of why elevators were able to take off. It's practically impossible to make an elevator fall down a shaft.

Now us growing up with them simply take everything for granted to the point we have absolutely no clue at all about what we're using, but always have used it, so just assume it must be okay as is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis#Lasting_success

This is an important point, I think. There's a generational aspect to this. Those of us who came of age prior to the internet (and especially social media) being ubiquitous don't really have an expectation that we're owed a forum where we can just say anything that's on our mind. As one of those olds, whenever I hear people complaining about "censorship" on whatever social media platform it kind of sounds entitled to my ears. We didn't expect to have a platform prior to about 2005 or so. We didn't have 'followers'. We discussed politics with a few friends in a bar over drinks. But now so many people seem to expect these private companies to provide them with a platform where they should be able to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a platform for that speech.

Now, like electricity and water, it's become so fundamentally entwined with modern living that folks see it (maybe rightfully) as a common right.

edit: I'm not sure it's generational as much - the folks complaining about it the loudest seem to be older, non-technical folks.

It doesn't feel like it's fundamentally entwined like electricity or water - It would be tough to live without electricity or water. But I live just fine without social media - in fact, I think my quality of life has gone up after deleting my twitter account back in May. And to a large degree, I think we're worse off as a society than we were prior to the emergence of social media.

Yes, there is some knowledge for some internet savvy types who grew up with the internet, but a lot of people are casual users. Many people still feel anonymity gives them carte blanche to be a jerk, or worse.

The amount of effort to be online is zero, but the amount of effort of people to behave is sometimes also zero (or low), of course depending on context. HN is a lot more civilized, but if it stopped being moderated it would in time be a nasty place as well.

I don't think it's even anonymity, for some, indirect communication is enough: I once had a roommate who would leave unpleasant messages on the answering machine, but would be perfectly nice in person (on the same topic, even).

It's because there are assholes everywhere. They are small in number, but they are pretty evenly spread throughout the population. Regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, age or any other demographic detail, they are everywhere.

And they always have been, and likely always will be.

I suppose that social media dynamic allows them to disproportionately visit their douchebaggery on the rest of us, but that's not "Eternal September." That's just humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it.

I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"

There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)

And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.

So as somebody who noticed this bit of drama, and looked into it, I can explain. It's actually all very simple. Here goes:

It's a stunt!

Yup, they say that much. They tried protesting, they tried blocking roads, but were making page 10 of the newspaper. So they came out with some dramatic, outrageous plan that they knew wouldn't do harm (they planned this well in advance, and glued themselves to glass, not to the actual painting) but would be weird enough for people to talk about it. Plus there's a degree of symbolism in it.

> (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)

Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism. Glue yourself to a gas pump? You'll get insulted and probably dragged off, plus gas stations are kind of meaningless and replaceable and often not anywhere very interesting. Protest at oil infrastructure? It's typically remotely located, and secured. You won't be noticed before you're removed. Block Shell's HQ? Good luck blocking a huge building with multiple entrances and security.

Point being there's nothing oil related I can think of where you could cause some sort of disturbance, quickly get attention, have the press get to you before you got forcefully removed from there, and have the story be interesting enough to have a prominent place in the news.

So is trying to destroy cultural heritage. I see no qualitative difference between trying to deface a Vermeer and blowing up the Afghan Stone Buddhas.