Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such wo... See more

But the problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.

Max Weber introduced a three-fold typology of legitimacy, the sentiments that get people to acquiesce to authority, especially regarding rules or commands they may dislike or disagree with.[viii] For most of human history, the most common kinds of authority have been traditional or charismatic. Traditional authority appeals to the “eternal yesterda... See more

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings ... See more

These are the sorts of ways in which speech moderation online must embrace the political. The main question we must be asking about a speech platform is not what are the standards for moderation but who moderates and what is the moderator’s relationship to the community .

A crucial element to lowering the stakes of any particular moderation decision is the knowledge that the user has the genuine option to go to another community or start his own. The same applies to moderators: The ultimate check on a moderator’s power is that if most users start to believe he is using it poorly, users can either protest until a new... See more

But if this ideal of freedom may be absolute within its domain, this is possible only because the domain is narrow, tightly limited by rigorous conditions for entering it.

Without trust in the decision-maker, trust in the process breaks down, and the only important question becomes, “Who decides?”

Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random distributio... See more