Heavy moderation can potentially work. But it needs to try and be objective and politically neutral, not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
But this is nonsense -- what does "politically neutral" even mean in this context?
> not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
Moderation literally is silencing/banning someone.
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My (slightly uncharitable) take is that when "non-political" or "objective" gets brought up in this context it usually means anything that the poster already agrees with, and "political" or "subjective" means value judgements that the poster disagrees with.
But any moderation policy you bring up in a private space -- from banning alt-coin scams to blocking pornography to deciding what does and doesn't constitute harassment -- all of that is a balance between protecting communities and allowing people more space to speak, and making political decisions about what content does and doesn't belong in those categories.
All of these categories are socially constructed and based in part on group consensus about the types of content and people we would like to see banned/silenced.
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I'll also point out that using a word like "objective" can sometimes make free speech policies more strict. There have been multiple points in history where we believed something to be objective and settled truth that later turned out to be false.
So not only does this ignore the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to protect communities, it also ignores the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to avoid over-censorship.
What is and is not settled knowledge is often a contentious debate, and by treating it like it's not a contentious debate and like the decisions about what to ban are just fully impersonal and objective, we open the door both to people who want under-moderation and (surprisingly) also to people who want over-moderation or want to quell criticism of establishment ideas. By treating these moderation decisions like they're not decisions, we allow both over-aggressive and under-aggressive moderators to hide behind a veil of objectivity and to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about the content they allow.
Concepts like "objective" and "politically neutral" are what Walter Bryce Gallie called "essentially contested concepts."
Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc.
Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity."
The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded.
Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.
