We already have that with email and found solutions to it and the same solutions could apply (readers choose their own spam filtering). The hard problems are where something might or might not be illegal and people strongly disagree. Thats where 230 comes in and it suggests to me that platforms under its protection shouldn't censor unless directed by law enforcement .. The fact that they do is mysterious to me.

> readers choose their own spam filtering

That would surely simplify the problem - user chooses filter, then user is responsible. Then every social niche could have their own filters.

One thing I don't like about Google, FB and Twitter is that they don't tell us what content they have hidden from us. We should be able to know what was filtered out so we can re-rank with our own rules.

Of course that would not sit right with the web giants and politicians because they can't control anymore how our news get ranked and filtered.

If there's one outcome I wish to see from the new anti-trust push is to force them to open up the front-end and allow competing UIs and competing filters on their platforms. Why should a few people decide how information is accessed for the whole world by virtue of being the winners of a natural monopoly?

Behind the scenes email providers blackhole a huge amount of traffic that never touches even the spam inbox of their users. This is of course good, because it is what the users want. Social media companies likewise curate what content they allow to remain up because they want to please their users.

How do readers choose their own spam filters within services like Gmail et al? Honest question.

Spam filtering seems like a similar moderation issue?

People want a right to an audience, and spam filters limit that right

Not quite.

Spam filters are controlled by, and acting on behalf of, end users who would be receiving the spam. When people are unhappy about their spam filtering, they can adjust or turn off these filters, or migrate to another e-mail provider (keeping all the e-mails, and ability to communicate with the same people).

The issue with modern social media, they implement censorship no one asked for, in a completely opaque way, and don't even support user migration.

Nearly all useful communities make use of shared moderation to select context that is desired rather than merely filter out obvious spam.

It's not obvious that you could reproduce reddit or hacker news for example with a dumb pipe and user filters.

Maybe step one is proving that is even possible before insisting people do it.

When you have 2.8 billion people using a web app, that's way too many people to be a community, let alone a useful one.

Facebook or Twitter as a whole is not a community. You can build actual community on top of them if you want. I have no objections against moderators of these groups doing their moderation, if I don't like your moderation I can always leave your groups or unfriend you.

The problem is, Facebook and Twitter themselves are censoring content. Apparently, FB even censors private messages with political views they don't like.

Give me some examples of things that are being blocked that ought not to be? Lay of the generalities unless you feel up to defending the kind of material being banned.

I don't think Facebook ought to be required to provide a platform for people it doesn't want to. It is an absolute violation of their rights to force them to use their private property to promote beliefs they find abhorrent.

For example I don't think neo nazis, anti vaxxers, or election truthers need to have a more efficient way to spread their poisonous lies. I don't think Facebook ought to be limited to throwing up their hands and suggesting individual communities that don't want to hear about the next final solution simply don't attend to their hate.

The solution to undesirable speech isn't merely more speech when the undesirable speech is being used to plan the overthrow of democracy and the murder of their enemies because eventually you wont have the privilege of speaking against them.

> Give me some examples of things that are being blocked that ought not to be?

Last URL I encountered was this, check the comments: https://avoiceformen.com/featured/my-son-doesnt-want-to-be-a...

> It is an absolute violation of their rights to force them to use their private property to promote beliefs they find abhorrent.

If FB is that intolerant to other people's opinions, they should do something else instead of being a social network 35% of global population uses at least every month.

My cell phone allows me to discuss anything using the property of the operator. My internet provider doesn't care what I do with their property as long as I don't break laws and pay bills. I don't see what makes social media so special that they're allowed to arbitrarily censor opinions on the internets in centralized manner. Especially in private messages. Especially after doing everything they possibly can to make sure there's no competition on the market.

Your link is full of hateful lies. It tells people that their transgender kid is really just a confused youngster who was somehow convinced by hucksters that he ought to whack his penis off for no reason which encourages parents to fix their kid by deprogramming them before its too late. This is exactly the attitude that leads to the massive suicide rate among transgendered teens. The world view it represents is basically a hallucination.

They are allowed to censor stuff on their networks because you are ultimately using their property and do so under terms set by owners of that property. This is completely trivial to understand. No law protects your ability to use that property as you please and until you get sufficient support from the general populace and the legislature none shall.

The dumb pipe that everyone is allowed to use as they please is the internet. This is more than sufficient. You don't need to have freedom to use facebook as you please in order to have reasonable freedom of expression. You can have your own website and express your opinion therein.

It's hateful and it's child abuse. There's nothing humble about parents who hate their LGBT+ children.

I disagree with your interpretation. Parents hating their kids don't care what's happening to them, the OP obviously cares, otherwise she wouldn't be writing that article. As for LGBT+, that's unlikely as well, here's a quote: "he isn’t gay: in fact, he has a girlfriend".

I'm not a child psychologist, I don't know these people, and I don't have a strong opinion on that particular topic.

But I do have a strong opinion on the following. I don't want Facebook, or anyone at all for that matter, to globally police content on the internets. With great power comes great responsibility. Social media have been abusing their power for years, yet they bear zero responsibility, lacking transparency, and implemented no ways to appeal.

If you don't understand the language it's easy to see how you miss it, but stuff like this is pure hate. It's based on lies. It's pushing a narrative ("my kid isn't really trans, it's just a fad pushed on him by the trans agenda") when the reality is that kid is too scared to come out to their parents; trans healthcare is a fucking joke; and society hates trans people and spends considerable time and money making their lives harder.

> adults on the internet were grooming vulnerable kids

This combines a decades old trope (LGBT+ people are predatory child abusers) with a more modern attempt to deny access to trans healthcare (trans kids are mentally ill and lack capacity to make decisions). The article develops that mentally ill point here:

> A lot of the young men calling themselves transgender have autism, ADHD, OCD or Asperger syndrome. Parents have sometimes known about these conditions for many years. But gender clinics aren’t interested in pursuing therapies which might actually help these kids understand why they feel the way they do. It’s the only field of medicine where you’re not allowed to talk about comorbidities or other treatments. This is the medical scandal of the century.

...and it combines it with a lie about treatment. Care for transgender children very much spends time with psychological assessment to question whether the child actually is trans.

She goes on to lie about affirmation:

> there’s nothing but affirmation

Here she's making the claim that affirmation is a pathway to puberty blockers, then cross sex hormones and surgery. That's untrue. An important part of healthcare is to explore fully the child's ideas around gender, and the way you do that is with affirmation -- they then trust the healthcare team and open up about what they think and why they think it.

> I have spent all of the lockdown researching transgenderism

Here's a handy hint: anyone using the term transgenderism is an anti-trans bigot.

All the anti-trans people posting links to HN can never post something from WHO or CDC or WPATH or American Academy of Pediatrics -- it's always some blog post that's unsourced to anything credible and full of disinfo.

There is a difference between a communist autocracy where the parties with political and military power get to define what the right opinion is and a free market of ideas where people are allowed to express all sorts of ideas including hateful ones but where others are free to disassociate themselves from you and not to promote your ideas.

The difference between phone and internet systems is that they represent a limited number of points of contact between yourself and the entire rest of the world its important that they remain impartial in the same way that we don't want your local and only power company deciding whether your shop can exist.

The broader internet is inherently diverse enough to allow virtually everyone who isn't actually directly violating the same laws as they exist within to exist. We don't need facebook as a common carrier to achieve this.

Lets contextualize this shall we. Conservatives of the former average bent talking about fiscal responsibility, importance of gun rights, support of actual family values have zero problem operating in the prior and evolving social media context.

New school conservatives that flirt with hate and violence about as openly as David Duke or who promote actively harmful and hateful content are seeing their ability to do so curtailed after sharing their hate resulted in a number of people being murdered/harmed.

The thing is that this conservative demographic much as it has become more visible and more energetic because it is shrinking not because it is growing. In 20 years it will be limping. In 40 it will be virtually extinct.

I don't want deplorables to be able to spread poison easier. A dumb pipe with user side filtering wouldn't allow major platforms to deny neo nazis, anti vaxxers, and cults a platform.

Not really a problem. All that means is the platform gets designed differently - such as actually giving users control of what accounts/content they are shown.