Love this paragraph: “Free speech is a tool to discover truth. Content moderation is a tool for engendering social cohesion. You can optimize for truth or social cohesion, but you can’t optimize for both.”
But I’m more optimistic than you--I think there is an ideal system for balancing moderation with free-speech: decentralized policy.
The moment it becomes super easy for any person/company to express the kinds of content that they do and, maybe more relevant here, that they don’t want to see, the problem of content regulation can move from central decision-making to decision-making by the individuals who that content affects. Achieving that super-easy expression of content preferences is more an interface/technical/product problem than it is a governance problem.
Content-moderation, as we know it today, is the negative & centralized version of content selection more generally, which is a task that, assuming democracy as the ideal, ideally should be done by individuals for themselves & for their communities (rather than by Meta/Elon/etc)
Many others have come to this conclusion, such that it has led to a movement for a parallel economy. Gab, Dan Bongino, RightForge. We need to try and support those who have the guts to create parallel systems and platforms.
Do you want to come on The Jonathan Kogan Show and share your thoughts? They should reach as wide if an audience as possible IMO. Let me know! :) https://jsk.transistor.fm/subscribe
Love this paragraph: “Free speech is a tool to discover truth. Content moderation is a tool for engendering social cohesion. You can optimize for truth or social cohesion, but you can’t optimize for both.”
But I’m more optimistic than you--I think there is an ideal system for balancing moderation with free-speech: decentralized policy.
The moment it becomes super easy for any person/company to express the kinds of content that they do and, maybe more relevant here, that they don’t want to see, the problem of content regulation can move from central decision-making to decision-making by the individuals who that content affects. Achieving that super-easy expression of content preferences is more an interface/technical/product problem than it is a governance problem.
Content-moderation, as we know it today, is the negative & centralized version of content selection more generally, which is a task that, assuming democracy as the ideal, ideally should be done by individuals for themselves & for their communities (rather than by Meta/Elon/etc)
Many others have come to this conclusion, such that it has led to a movement for a parallel economy. Gab, Dan Bongino, RightForge. We need to try and support those who have the guts to create parallel systems and platforms.
Do you want to come on The Jonathan Kogan Show and share your thoughts? They should reach as wide if an audience as possible IMO. Let me know! :) https://jsk.transistor.fm/subscribe