Duncan Brain

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens. I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment. First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting: The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control. This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict. So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies. What is the goal to shoot for? You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it. The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards. Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar. You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas. You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later) Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways. There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.

Also, here is my favorite @elonmusk decision of all time: tesla.com/blog/all-our-paten… Personally I would love to see Twitter make more decisions in a similar spirit to *that*. IMO @sriramk ideas on transparent content moderation are a great place to start: teapawt.net/sriramk/status/1599137…

Interesting. I only believe 80% of my beliefs.