I’m very excited by the prospect of a more free speech freindly twitter, as I think their (and other firms) use of aggressive censorship has done a lot of harm over the last few years.
It would be good to achieve this while still offering more pro-censorship users the experience they want. This should make the change policy change less likely to be reversed, and help Twitter’s commercial success.
One method to achieve this might be to allow users to choose a form of censorship from a menu. Different groups would produce different censorship algorithms, and users would only see content that was compliant with their chosen algorithm(s). You could have a wide variety of different algorithms for different user preferences, e.g.:
ChildSafe, for parents to protect their kids from sex, swearing etc.
SFW, for people logging in on their work machines.
LGBTQIA+ Ally, blocking anything that seems bigoted.
NoSports, for those who don’t want to read about sports.
Libertopia, which allows everything.
Index Titiatum Prohibitorum, protecting Catholics from seeing unpopish things.
These filters could compete to produce the best user experience.
This way, people would be able to protect themselves from ‘toxic’ tweets without burdening others who want to learn and debate in an unencumbered manner.
This way, people would be able to protect themselves from ‘toxic’ tweets without burdening others who want to learn and debate in an unencumbered manner.
Fwiw, there are tons of tweets that are genuinely toxic on Twitter—personal attacks, threats, and so on—that Twitter in my view currently does too little rather than too much about. Twitter may sometimes be too strict but the opposite issue is very much a problem as well. And I think that that view shouldn’t be called “pro-censorship”, which seems to me an unnecessarily value-laden term.
Federated Censorship.
I’m very excited by the prospect of a more free speech freindly twitter, as I think their (and other firms) use of aggressive censorship has done a lot of harm over the last few years.
It would be good to achieve this while still offering more pro-censorship users the experience they want. This should make the change policy change less likely to be reversed, and help Twitter’s commercial success.
One method to achieve this might be to allow users to choose a form of censorship from a menu. Different groups would produce different censorship algorithms, and users would only see content that was compliant with their chosen algorithm(s). You could have a wide variety of different algorithms for different user preferences, e.g.:
ChildSafe, for parents to protect their kids from sex, swearing etc.
SFW, for people logging in on their work machines.
LGBTQIA+ Ally, blocking anything that seems bigoted.
NoSports, for those who don’t want to read about sports.
Libertopia, which allows everything.
Index Titiatum Prohibitorum, protecting Catholics from seeing unpopish things.
These filters could compete to produce the best user experience.
This way, people would be able to protect themselves from ‘toxic’ tweets without burdening others who want to learn and debate in an unencumbered manner.
Fwiw, there are tons of tweets that are genuinely toxic on Twitter—personal attacks, threats, and so on—that Twitter in my view currently does too little rather than too much about. Twitter may sometimes be too strict but the opposite issue is very much a problem as well. And I think that that view shouldn’t be called “pro-censorship”, which seems to me an unnecessarily value-laden term.