Wired: More Content Moderation Is Not Always Better

This is a stupid article.

Progressive activists who are 8% of the population and who are the most leftwing people in America already have all the answers. They have everything figured out like COVID.

They just need the power to establish a progressive dictatorship and to control what everyone else who lives here can say on the internet. This is a simple matter of wielding power to silence dissent. That’s how we will fix the spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories and domestic extremism.

Wired:

“Content moderation is eating the world. Platforms’ rule-sets are exploding, their services are peppered with labels, and tens of thousands of users are given the boot in regular fell swoops. No platform is immune from demands that it step in and impose guardrails on user-generated content. This trend is not new, but the unique circumstances of a global public health emergency and the pressure around the US 2020 election put it into overdrive. Now, as parts of the world start to emerge from the pandemic, and the internet’s troll in chief is relegated to a little-visited blog, the question is whether the past year has been the start of the tumble down the dreaded slippery content moderation slope or a state of exception that will come to an end. …

The chaos of 2020 shattered any notion that there’s a clear category of harmful “misinformation” that a few powerful people in Silicon Valley must take down, or even that there’s a way to distinguish health from politics. Last week, for instance, Facebook reversed its policy and said it will no longer take down posts claiming Covid-19 is human-made or manufactured. Only a few months ago The New York Times had cited belief in this “baseless” theory as evidence that social media had contributed to an ongoing “reality crisis.” There was a similar back-and-forth with masks. Early in the pandemic, Facebook banned ads for them on the site. This lasted until June, when the WHO finally changed its guidance to recommend wearing masks, despite many experts advising it much earlier. The good news, I guess, is they weren’t that effective at enforcing the ban in the first place. (At the time, however, this was not seen as good news.) …

Finally, it is becoming clearer every day that removing content alone does not address the underlying social and political issues that led to the creation of the content in the first place. Trump’s hold on the Republican party did not evaporate along with his Twitter account, even though the online world is talking about him less than they have in five years. QAnon remains astonishingly popular, despite having been largely banished by the major platforms. Meanwhile, mega-money is pouring into creating an alternative “free speech” social media ecosystem. If these investments pay off, and the alt-tech platforms continue to grow, kicking people off so-called mainstream platforms may do even less than it has been doing. …”

We have to stop authoritarianism!

The authoritarians and bigots are the people who support free speech and who aren’t perpetually offended by verbal violence on the internet.