Why not? In my country, these opinions are uttered so openly and commonly that it does not even raise an eyebrow. Infact these are cherished religious beliefs, even.
Yet, there are viewpoints that would be considered so utterly innocent in the west as to be as unnoticeable as punctuation, that have led to actual mob violence and lynchings, and I am talking this decade, not some old era bygones.
Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.
I am indeed in Pakistan, and the point I am trying to make is, why not? "Diverse" council, right? My region comprises of a BILLIONS people, and twitter is a global website, why do you expect Twitter to ban hate speech acc to what average American internet person wants, but not acc to rules of other countries?
Remember, I am not talking merely about legally limited speech, I am talking about stuff that causes societal discomfort.
If it's a "diverse" council, then there are bound to be people from this part of the world. And if they give, with a straight face, the examples you see in the funzies link as example of hate speech they would like to be moderated....
How would you feel, if your tweet was blocked, and the reason given is something you, and any body from your part of the world, would personally consider to be as offense as not ending your sentence with a fullstop would be to a grammar nazi...but to the council it was considered as offensive as perhaps saying the N-word?
I am talking from a purely academic point of view, but you have to realise the scope of these matters. Pakistan might not be able to affect Twitter moderation, but India? definitely, too big a market to ignore. The Gulf Countries are already investors alongside Musk, so them too. EU has already given the halt signal.
My personal opinion and absolutely dissociated from my employer: I am not going to talk about economic decisions or market pressure, but free speech standards should also be not framed around India's standards. A diverse council shouldn't have to include viewpoints that are wrong. Defining wrong is certainly a difficult measure to elaborate, but free speech standards that include some religious persecution are definitely in that wrong category. Bigots will always say that they aren't bigots.
Isn't that the point they're making? Not that the specific utterances matter but that the freedom to utter them matters, any or all of them, your blasphemies and mine. Then we can try to have a grown up conversation about it because we've taken oppression/suppression and hence violence off the table.
but that's absolutely the wrong example, to take your analogy, YOU are the news station, YOU are the content generator, and Twitter is perhaps like.... the cable company?
Twitter isn't providing you and a platform for free; it sells ads alongside it. And if its moderation is too strict, then it's not an effective platform.
which goes to my original question, strict according to whom?
Nope. News stations don't generate content, they report it. If you think YOU are the news station because you generate content you're watching too much Fox News.
Yeah it’s almost like moderation is a really hard problem that requires serious people to think deeply about it, not something that can be solved with vague platitudes about freedom.
> Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.
Just FYI, the "fire in a crowded theater" is actually a widely-spread yet terrible example, as it was actually overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. So, yelling fire in a crowded theater is actually legally not addressed by either decision and the famous quote is part of an overturned ruling.
It will be, if Elon implements effective agent-based clustering, such as with K-Means Clustering.
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated. Also, then the police and FBI could use all the evil content to "do their job" (but, I'm not holding my breath).
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal. The algorithms are linear in complexity, so should be parallelizable.
I'd be interested to learn how you think kmeans helps either diversity or hate speech detection.
I don't think it helps with any of either, as people's behavior, the context, the language used and sensibilities change across cultures and over time. What you call hate speech now may not be in the future and may not have been in the past.
The best you could hope for is creating a fuzzy representation of the most visible problematic behavior and try to outrun model-world dealignment by constantly updating it.
The clustering responds to which tweets are up- and down-voted by the agent.
And, the agent is moved closer to the clusters they like tweets from, and further from the clusters they dislike tweets from.
The more diverse your likes (likes tweets in many other clusters), the broader and less restrictive your cluster weighting is -- the more variety you see. The more restrictive your selection, the less variety.
You decide how much of an "echo chamber" you're in. But, if you don't like $BAD_THING, and you downvote enough tweets of $BAD_THING, the less you'll see tweets by people in groups where they like $BAD_THING.
Recommender systems for news and social media have been tried, and I don't doubt that there may be niches where they succeed.
But large platforms have two massive problems:
(1) what people want is popular content, sometimes even content they would downvote. This destroys clustering by creating fuzzy centralized bridges and erodes the usefulness of recommenders
(2) people over time have lost trust and interest in highly personalized feeds, see facebook or the revolt against instagram's feed sorting.
Two cases that seem to work for now are music recommendation and tiktok. I'm not holding my breath though, because spotify might end up driving people away with too many monetized podcasts and tiktok could succumb to the generational migration. But we'll see!
Sentiment analysis can solve the first. If the algo notices that someone only engages negatively with another cluster, cut it off; they're not entitled to pollute that.
And the second point was a mostly abstract intellectual debate in the early 2010s, but people have proven that they absolutely prefer to stick with their own, and have close-to-zero tolerance for dissent or disagreement (see, "the hivemind"). Twitter is far more prone to this than Facebook, since it's founded on communities (i.e. clusters) rather than just friends. Twitter just needs to stop putting junk into people's feeds; and silo them better to reduce harassment.
That would also reduce polarization, since a yuge cause for polarization (far-right, antifa) is a knee-jerk reaction to the very worst content from the other side. Stop promoting that, and you'll stop the "Brainwashing Of My Dad" effect (the film), where a conservative from Texas gets upset because of bathroom laws in California, or where a liberal gets upset because of a few 4chan trolls.
It's the psychological phenomenon of "enmeshment": remove the boundaries between people, and you make their relationship very toxic and conflictual. Enforce better boundaries, and their relationship will be far healthier. Twitter promoted the former; Musk can avoid most of the upcoming "hell" being predicted by doing the latter.
How does this work with things like "ratio-ing" or "dunking" or libsoftiktok that intentionally take clusters of media from one group and shoving it into their group explicitly to hate them?
If anything is clear from the texts that came up during discovery, it's that Elon Musk hasn't thought anything through with this deal.
Long Covid brain fog? Marijuana-induced schizophrenia? Has he just been stupid and lucky all along? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to figure out why.
How does that help? The whole problem is that twitter provides a platform to legitimize hate speech by spreading it to like-minded people and thereby emboldening them. clustering does exactly that, but shields bad actors with a cloak of secrecy.
There's no secrecy. The FBI can (and should) infiltrate these groups (just like their tweets, and you're in), and then arrest them for their illegal behavior. And, limited in-real-life moderation of illegal posts can be focused on where the crazy people hang out. It should be a win.
There are people who enjoy reasoned debate, even if they don't agree with the counterparty. They won't downvote those tweets. Their cluster weight will be gently moving in the direction of others like them, and its weight will let through a wide variety of other gently weighted groups.
Others are compelled to screech and foam at the mouth if someone argues for a $WRONGTHINK - even in jest or as a devil's advocate, and will downvote them instantly. Their weightings will be heavy, and will exclude most other groups. They will see only what they want to see, and won't see what they don't want to see -- reasoned debate from groups they disagree with, for example.
This is a personal choice, and mirrors physical group dynamics.
If someone "in your group" starts talking crazy, they will begin to separate from the group (by mutual down-voting), and migrate to a different group. You (and the rest of your group) won't be affected much.
I'm sure that already existed. Unless he intends to expand the diversity into the realm of racism or other types of bigotry or conspiracy beliefs. In my observation, Twitter is extremely permissive in what kind of speech it allows, drawing a line only at abject hate speech, threats or deliberate disinformation. None of that suffers from lack of diversity of viewpoints. Musk is either intending to allow a lot more shit flinging or he's really deluding himself that he can solve this problem. I'd honestly be more optimistic if he was bringing OpenAI in to do moderation.
Right, so the game becomes making your viewpoint as extreme as possible to shift the window of the council in your favour. What could possibly go wrong.
Not all viewpoints are equally valid. Just finding the middle of the viewpoints that exist isn't moderate because you can't just pretend that all sides have equal numbers of extremists and that somehow their views automatically "cancel out".
With the context of Elon saying it, yes. Diverse views where the views are all reasonable is one thing, allowing extremists a platform to misinform and radicalise is not. Elon has made it clear he thinks extremist rhetoric such as Trump's should be allowed.
Do you not see how that same type of hate is already directed at white people? Sanity has lost if you have to be some sort of "crazy right winger" to see the blatant hate and racism directed at white people.
I'm writing this from a country that currently has a giant nationwide chain store that has a public "No Whites, Blacks Only" hiring policy.
