A simple proposal for preserving free speech on twitter
There’s this constant tension between the principle of free speech, which allows people to freely express their opinions, and the individuals rights to not have to listen to speech they find unpleasant or otherwise annoying/distracting.
In everyday life we solve this by letting anyone say what they want where they want, and anyone who doesn’t want to listen avoids going to those places where people are saying things they don’t want to listen to. Newspapers and magazines will print whatever most appeals to their audience, and people only read the ones that interest them. Mostly it works out.
The same approach works pretty well in blogs. People can write whatever they want, but nobody has to read anything they don’t like. Those blogs which are most unpleasant won’t get many links and so will be difficult to find unless you’re searching for them directly.
If you don’t like what somebody’s writing on a Whatsapp group, you can either ban them from the group, or leave the group yourself.
On twitter though this approach starts to break down. Somebody can reply to thousands of people, none of whom have expressed any interest in their views, and their responses might be seen by millions of people. Sure, you can block them one by one, but there’s more people to block than you have seconds in your day.
The current approach taken by twitter in extreme cases is to ban the user from twitter. Whilst that’s a reasonable approach in a Whatsapp group, where there’s always another Whatsapp group to join, twitter has over 450 million active users—over 10% of the world population, and has an enormous impact on popular discourse. Stopping someone from being able to air their views there definitely significantly impinges on their ability to freely express their views—and the threat of being banned can have a similar impact.
A simple solution could be to, instead of banning someone from twitter, simply stop them from being able to reply to non-followers[1]. They can still express whatever opinions they want, and anyone who wants to could search for them, follow them, retweet them, reply to them and link them. But they wont be able to use twitter to forcefully communicate with people who aren’t interested. If they’re popular enough (e.g. Donald Trump), they’ll continue to get plenty of engagement on twitter, satisfying our desire for free speech. If nobody is interested in them they can continue tweeting into the void eternally.
- ^
As far as retweeting is concerned, I would suggest that they would be able to retweet non-followers, but it wouldn’t show up in the list of retweets.
I think the problem with this post is that it’s not clear about what the actual issue happens to be. There are a few different stakeholders with different interests and this post tries to avoid thinking about the interests of the individual stakeholders but focus on abstract principles.
Twitters current approach of how to deal with people is a lot more complicated than either banning or not banning a person.
I want LessWrong posts that touch on politically charged topics to focus on trying to deal with reality in the complexity that it has instead of dumbing down complexity.
Every post touching on political topics over the last week has some elements of ‘dumbing down complexity’ though?
This seems like an unrealistic expectation to impose on casual writers.
One definition I found for casual was “not serious or careful in attitude”. I don’t want to read political writing on LessWrong that’s not serious and careful in attitude.
LessWrong doesn’t exist for casual political conversation. There are serious political topics where it makes sense to speak carefully about them, and I do think those have a place on LessWrong but LessWrong can go without casual political discussion.
The majority of such writing on LW is not seriously or carefully prepared beforehand. And that’s not limited to just political topics either.
This solves only a 3rd of the problem—speech that listeners do not want to hear. There are two more
Speech with a negative externality. If somebody with a lot of followers starts advocating genocide, we might want to block it even if the followers want to hear it. But then the question becomes—how much negative externality, how much certainly in that externality existing, etc should speech have before we’d want to block it (this is the “COVID vaccine misinformation”, “voting misinformation” and other similar categories where clear boundaries are hard to draw, and where any decisions—whether to block, or not to block—would always be controversial).
Posts next to ads. The “real” customers of Twitter are advertisers, not users, and they have strong preferences of what kinds of posts they want to be or not to be next to their ads.
Upstream from this: stop optimizing for user engagement.
My first thought, and the first thought my wife had, was that this idea feels really good at first, and the reasoning sound, but it also feels a bit like what you would do if you wanted to intentionally exacerbate echo-chamber effects. Whether it would it actually have that effect, I don’t know.
unfortunately, this would request musk to actually value free speech; given that he’s been banning the detractors he promised not to, I would bet against anything like this getting tried.
that’s a cheap shot...
not really? he has demonstrated himself to be all the worst things people said about him along many dimensions. this is one of the most important ones. really don’t expect he’d go for anything like this.
Yes, yes, it is, a very cheap shot. Imagine yourself in his shoes, basically making a stupid decision in a rush, then 6 months later being forced through courts (or nearly so) to spend a sizable chunk of your money on something you don’t want, and being saddled with quarterly payments that mess with your plans in a big way. You work every waking hour at your 4 or 5 jobs, in a constantly worsening economic climate, and realize that one of them is not nearly as straightforward as the rest, that you have to deal with humans rather than with technology, and humans are complicated and messy, especially for someone who is self-admitted to be on the spectrum. You try to find someone else to do it for you, but the financial circumstances are dire and there is no one you can trust, just like you couldn’t trust anyone else to lead your other businesses, because, sadly, no one is up to snuff in your eyes.
so he lied even more times than just about free speech? like. dude is a billionaire. If you sign up to have that level of excess power, I feel like you basically give up almost all rights not explicitly listed in the bill of rights? certainly any right to have any excuse for your mistakes. in a reasonable world, it wouldn’t be possible to steal that much money via hyperstitional dishonest betting. Dude promised free speech, then proceeded to squash critical speech—oh no, he’s so stressed out! he got funding from the saudis to take over an important social network. if this is a cheap shot, we need to be making more cheap shots—he shouldn’t have your respect, and he shouldn’t have before, either.
It sounds to me like you have made your mind on this topic, given your statements like “he got funding from the saudis to take over an important social network”, which, while not an outright falsehood, misrepresents reality in various critically important ways. Which in turn means that further discussing it is likely pointless.