The Twitter and Facebook bans are arbitrary, cynical, unprincipled and further evidence that regulation of social media platforms is urgently required.
Much worse has been allowed, and is still present on both platforms than the precipitating posts.
... on Twitter.
Well, okay, presumably Edwards means that Trump ought to have been banned and so on years and years ago, but because he wasn't and because the straw that broke the camel's back was what it was, the Trump ban isn't a sign of Twitter's being responsible but, instead, a manifestation of its arbitrary, cynical and unprincipled moderation practices. But then he goes on to say:
We should not be abdicating responsibility for the tough policy decisions required, and delegating responsibility for our community standards to conflicted corporates
Now, I should point out we've got a censorship board in NZ that does, in fact, actually censor stuff fairly regularly so that's probably important to remember. However, I do still think that Edwards is accepting the premise of people like Ted Cruz when they say things like:
Big Tech’s PURGE, censorship & abuse of power is absurd & profoundly dangerous.
If you agree w/ Tech’s current biases (Iran, good; Trump, bad), ask yourself, what happens when you disagree?
Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?
i.e. that places like Twitter are public, not private, spaces and that speech within them is controlled wholly by laws (rather than private rules).
Now, I'm perfectly willing to say that Uber is a taxi company with employees but I'm a lot more sceptical about saying that social media sites aren't private clubs with private rules. But it's much, much easier to believe that places like Twitter have been metaphorically getting away with murder by literally allowing people like Trump to say the things they say on their sites. In that sense, the question is: how would you regulate sites without editorial control (aka pre-emptive moderation)?
On one hand, the obvious solution is to force the existence of editorial control on places like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and, yes, NSG. However, I feel this would be deeply, deeply wrong and would represent by far the strongest walking back of the (obviously misleading) idea that the internet is a force for democracy. Of course, I'm sure many old media firms would be very happy with mandated editorial control since, after all, the ability to control what is published, by whom and when was the basis of their business models (in the sense that controlling output meant they controlled audiences, which meant they had advertising space).
Of course, there's always the other (and more usual) kind of moderation: retroactive moderation (as practised on this forum... and basically how policing works IRL/outside). Now, if we reject Edwards and Cruz's POV it's pretty simple: we'd force these social media giants (as well as small and medium enterprises/sites like NSG) to demonstrate that they're adequately moderating. Leaving aside all the other problems that may or may not exist with this scheme, I suggest it has the same anti-democratic problems as mandating editorial control. Look, I'm from NZ and you're from [not NZ]. Obviously, we don't live our lives subject to the same laws and regulatory frameworks... as we've seen NZ has a censorship board, but NZ's also one of like two or three countries that allows pharmaceutical advertising to random citizens. However, we both use this website, right? Thus we have the question... how can we both use a site under "mandated moderation" except by the entirely coincidental overlap of what our governments decide adequate moderation to mean?
Now... I don't really want the UN or the ICC to be responsible for determining moderation's adequacy but that's a solution here: just make sure everything follows international law.
It's when we accept Edwards' premise that things get interesting since now it seems the way to do it is to do the moderating yourself. And hence... moderation farms (after troll farms) with police powers. Think of them like transit cops. It doesn't solve the problem of different legal systems, sure, but it is the logical extension of what Edwards is presumably doing (unless, you know, his point really was really, "Waaah, Trump's been banned" a la Cruz).
So... what say ye, NSG? What should be the role of government in moderation of web forums (and their inferior derivative competitors like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit)?
