A brief argument that “moderation” is distinct from censorship mainly when it’s optional.
I read this as a corollary to Scott’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. It certainly raises similar issues—especially the existence of exit rights. Currently, even heavily free-speech platforms maintain the option of deleting content. This can be legal or practical. But doing so is incompatible with an “exit” right to opt back in to the deleted material.
Scott also suggests that if moderation becomes “too cheap to meter,” it’s likely to prevent the conflation with censorship. I’m not sure I see it. Assuming he means something like free, accurate AI tagging/filtering, how does that remove the incentive to call [objectionable thing X] worthy of proper censorship? I suppose it reduces the excuse of “X might offend people,” requiring more legible harms.
As a side note, I’m curious if anyone else browses the moderation log periodically. Perhaps I’m engaging with outrage fuel. But it also seems like an example of unchecking (some of) the moderation filters to keep calibrated.
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Notes -
Scott seems to be carving out a very novel definition of 'moderation' - virtually no forum ever has practiced moderation in that sense (a few, like, Reddit may come close with highly downvoted comments sometimes being hidden by default, but that's not the primary form moderation takes there or anywhere else).
I don't know what the point of this analogy is. If China merely discouraged the spread of information it didn't like instead of brutally repressing it, China would be very different? Yes, obviously, but what does that have to do with moderation policies on social media platforms?
This is unlikely to satisfying the people who are upset about getting booted from from social media platforms. People already routinely construe criticism as a form of censorship. How happy are they likely to be when they're tagged as a twitter-certified anti-semite? It also doesn't satisfy the platforms or their customers*, since they generally don't want the association with the sort of content we're talking about.
*a reminder that for most social media platforms the customers are not the users and vice versa.
The "see banned posts" opt-in is a non-starter because then what about replies to such posts? If you allow them but also hide them, then you create a shadow platform of absolute free speech below your sanitized platform. If you disallow replies, then you do kill off that strand of conversation so it's still censorship in effect.
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