Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

Can this be summarized as &quot;Twitter, implement censorship because people are saying things we don&#x27;t like?&quot; I fully understand that Twitter is a company offering a service and they are intrinsically allowed to police content being posted on their platform.<p>The whole point of democratic society in the United States is to allow people freedom of speech <i>and</i> thought. If we limit the discussion of ideas to only popular&#x2F;accepted&#x2F;politically-correct ones, then there is no chance to analyze ideas from a <i>relative</i> perspective; there is nothing to compare those ideas to. We must allow discourse, even at the extremes of the spectrum.<p>To quote various sources, &quot;There can be no light without dark.&quot;

Anything goes? Twitter have been actively censoring hashtags, banning people, shadow-banning accounts and most recently &quot;de-verifiying&quot; people due to political differences.

I don&#x27;t understand why Twitter doesn&#x27;t generate some general &quot;white&#x2F;blacklist&quot; feature that people could opt in&#x2F;out of? Things like, a &quot;porn&quot; filter, a &quot;n-word&quot; filter, a &quot;faminist&quot;&#x2F;&quot;mysogynist&quot; filter, etc. Some of these could be automatic (e.g. porn and spam and virus links), some manual (e.g. &quot;all people who this particular user disagrees with&quot;), they could be curated by Twitter itself or by any other entity&#x2F;user, and some general would be default&#x2F;opt-out (e.g. porn, hate speech, gore), others would be opt-in (e.g. &quot;no politics&quot; filter).<p>IMO that solves most of the problems - allowing unbiased freedom of speech&#x2F;communication, while still preserving basic decency for the majority of people. In addition, you&#x27;d have a capitalist market&#x2F;competition for ideas - if a curator of a filter becomes untrustworthy (starts abusing their &quot;power&quot; by &quot;censoring&quot; too many voices) the filter could simply by forked, improved, and users would migrate to something better!<p>Edit: In addition, this would also solve all kinds of legal issues - you could simply make a <i>per-country level</i> filters that users connecting from that country would automatically be exposed to, but all such government-imposed censorship would be implemented in a very transparent manner!

There&#x27;s a MUCH bigger problem to talk about.<p>Air, it&#x27;s time to end your anything-goes paradise. Your medium allows murderers, rapists and my crotchety old neighbor to create vibrations that will reach the ears of others.<p>Why are we allowing these criminals to vibrate molecules of air? We should be ashamed of ourselves.<p>I&#x27;m happy to announce Airfilter. A new device that uses machine learning-based active noise cancellation (and a blockchain reputation system) to selectively remove offensive vibrations from the entire atmosphere of the earth.<p>We&#x27;re hiring!

I&#x27;m surprised this is an actual article from the NY Times and not an editorial. Im very surprised any journalist would plead for censorship on the internet.

&gt; Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations?<p>Yep, because these are easily verifiable parameters that don&#x27;t depend in any way on the ethical beliefs and political alignment of whoever rates users.

When was the last time anyone referred to Twitter as &quot;anything-goes&quot;?<p>NYT, it&#x27;s time to end your &quot;editorials are news&quot; dystopia.

People are getting all caught up on the idea of censorship here but it is really about what Twitter is, and what does it want to be.<p>Does Twitter want to be a dumb pipe where it doesn&#x27;t do anything at all about what people post? If that is the case, then yeah, don&#x27;t do anything about bots, trolls, harassment&#x2F;abuse, etc.<p>Is Twitter actually an online community? If that is what they want it to be, then it will need at least some mechanisms to deal with toxic users.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s just giving users robust tools for filtering what they want to see. Maybe you could use sentiment analysis to give people the ability to block certain types of tweets from reaching them. And indeed, they already have some of that with the &#x27;sensitive content&#x27; setting on images and video.<p>The author here wants to go further into a reputation system, which may or may not be the right choice for Twitter. That seems to be a harder thing to do technically, but I&#x27;m pretty sure they could come up with something that tones down the impact of the worst abuse.<p>At the end of the day, if a general public social media platform becomes too toxic for too many users, it probably won&#x27;t survive. And that&#x27;s not even getting into the real world consequences that we&#x27;re starting to see from foreign intelligence services attempting to manipulate them.

&gt; It’s no accident that it is President Trump’s social network of choice.<p>This writer does realize that President Obama was the first President to consistently utilize twitter right? Of course President Trump took it to another level, but he is insinuating that President Trump is using to twitter to sway &quot;small minded&quot; Americans, but ignoring the fact that President Obama did the exact same thing on a smaller scale.

Maybe, I&#x27;m missing some larger point, but it seems like the real dilemma here is that people lack the discipline to give up things that do not benefit them. As per constant discussion here on HN, many of us continue to untangle social networks from our lives.<p>If Twitter has become a place where users spend more time complaining about the platform rather than actually using the platform, they should quit. Not because I have some utopian capitalist view where each user can just go off and build their own Twitter clone or because of some &quot;don&#x27;t like it, leave&quot; mentality. I&#x27;m saying this because I believe it&#x27;s conducive to their mental health.<p>Otherwise, people become quite cynical and make choices they wouldn&#x27;t normally make - as in limiting free speech for the sake of corporate gains.

Twitter is turning into a platform for censorship.<p>Or rather, a platform for nothing. RIP Twitter.

I feel like making a service where people can post public 140 character messages, and other people can follow them, and thats the entire app, and call it twitter classic.

I find it astonishing how presumably sober people think it&#x27;s reasonable to cry for censorship.

&gt; where even the vilest, most hateful and antisocial behavior should be tolerated.<p>I&#x27;m confused, I see stories complaining about Twitter&#x27;s heavy-handed censorship all the time, whether it&#x27;s banning accounts or simply removing objectionable hashtags from the &quot;Trending&quot; list.<p>When did they suddenly develop the opposite problem?