Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 with a reaction to our post about Substack CEO Chris Best's failure to answer some important basic questions:
The data
First, this is the most sharply concise confrontation with a CEO I have ever seen on this issue and I appreciate the author for having curated it.
What upsets me here, however, is Best's cynical claim that efforts to censor hate speech is pointless:
And my read is that that hasn't actually worked. That hasn't been a success. It hasn't caused those ideas not to exist. It hasn't built trust. It hasn't ended polarization. It hasn't done any of those things. And I don't think that taking the approach that the legacy platforms have taken and expecting it to have different outcomes is obviously the right answer the way that you seem to be presenting it to be."
First, he is missing the point, completely - it's not about ending" bad ideology - it's about preventing it from metastasizing. There will always be Nazis. The least we can do is limit its reach through some kind of corporate ethics.
Second, he cannot make any kind of claim that censorship doesn't work" unless there is some kind of legitimate study that measures some degree of influence (don't ask me how) under conditions X" versus conditions Y." He's just being lazy.
In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone replying to a comment that offered a strange claim about Musk having no choice but to globally block posts at the behest of the Indian government:
Musk made a decision to block certain tweets from being viewed outside of the jurisdiction of a given legal order. So far as I know, the power of the Indian government ends at the borders of India. What right does India have to tell a U.S. citizen that they shouldn't be able to view tweets that criticize the Indian government?
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with two more comments about the Chris Best interview. First, it's Dr. Fancypants, Esq. with a small observation:
Gotcha" questions
This is a drop in the bucket of this problematic interview, but it's fascinating to see Chris use gotcha question" to just mean question I'm unprepared to answer". That's a tic I strongly associate with GOP politicians.
Next, it's K'Tetch with some longer thoughts:
Chris' Moderation Problem
I think the moderation problem isn't address here, because Chris Best doesn't have a handle on what the actual problem is. If he uses his product (I don't know, I don't bother with them) then it's as a content producer, and if he looks at some, he's looking at it probably on an internal system, perhaps with internal filters applied to remove a lot of the scum (like looking at a NYT piece with the comments set to NYT recommended only'.
As CEO' he's never had to get down in the weeds, and spend hours doing the content moderation work. I spent 15 years doing it at TorrentFreak and it's horrible soul-destroying work. You see things far less in terms of simplistic right and wrong. Sometimes things look bad on first glance but are redeemed when taken in context. Some things look ok on their own but then look terrible in greater context (such as a string of comments in a thread that collectively push a strong anti-semetic screed.
I think he assumes that bad comments' are along the lines of 4chan shitposting, and not some of the vitriol that's out there now, some posing as reasonable arguments.
Seriously, him going undercover boss' (but not really) in the trenches in the content moderation team might open his eyes to reality. Might open the eyes of all kinds of CEOs, because the musks, zucks, Neil Mohan, etc. might benefit from actually seeing and interacting with the bad comments directly, instead of being shielded from it by well-meaning protective underlings.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Samuel Abram with a classic response to the assertion that Elon Musk has the maturity of a 15-year-old":
HEY!!
That's an insult to the maturity of 15-year-olds!
In second place, it's Pixelation with a comment about the Musk-Taibbi fight:
Oh look, Musk censoring Taibbi. Twitter is really censoring right wing speech now. Time for the conservatives" to call out Musk. Right?
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about attempts to copyright a rhythm:
I was going to finish reading this article, but then I realized Glyn was using words that someone else invented, so out of respect for the descendants of those people and their bank account balances, I can't support this clearly unauthorized infringement. Also, please donate to my GoFundMe campaign so I can afford the license fees to use the words I'm currently typing.
Finally, it's an anonymous comment about the Arkansas social media law:
Unnecessary Law
The new bill is unnecessary. The issue was fixed with the meat plant age verification bill!
The children are too busy at their jobs to use social media!
That's all for this week, folks!