My initial thought: I’m much more sketched out by platforms rate limiting users, than I am with them straight up banning them. The first is much more “micro-managing-y”, and I wonder if it can lead to more subtle and powerful distortions than outright bans, which are at least transparent.
I haven’t thought about it much, but I think I feel much safer about a marketplace of ideas that has a gate (some people are not permitted) than a marketplace of ideas that is slanted to advantage some ideas over others, especially if group deciding the slanting is centralized.
I think part of my intuition here is that, if you don’t let people into the marketplace, that’s one thing, but if you fuck with which things get propagated, you are distorting the basic mechanism of the marketplace of ideas, in which people sharing the things that they think are true leads to correct ideas gaining dominance over time.
On the other hand, given social media and hyper-competive memes, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that “the marketplace of ideas” is an outdated frame, and we need better concepts for pursuing the enlightenment project in a way that doesn’t get subverted.
I haven’t read the whole post yet.
My initial thought: I’m much more sketched out by platforms rate limiting users, than I am with them straight up banning them. The first is much more “micro-managing-y”, and I wonder if it can lead to more subtle and powerful distortions than outright bans, which are at least transparent.
I haven’t thought about it much, but I think I feel much safer about a marketplace of ideas that has a gate (some people are not permitted) than a marketplace of ideas that is slanted to advantage some ideas over others, especially if group deciding the slanting is centralized.
I think part of my intuition here is that, if you don’t let people into the marketplace, that’s one thing, but if you fuck with which things get propagated, you are distorting the basic mechanism of the marketplace of ideas, in which people sharing the things that they think are true leads to correct ideas gaining dominance over time.
On the other hand, given social media and hyper-competive memes, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that “the marketplace of ideas” is an outdated frame, and we need better concepts for pursuing the enlightenment project in a way that doesn’t get subverted.