Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

It is because a universal public square cannot be a community that the parameters of the online speech debate are stuck. The conflict between the “marketplace of ideas” framework and the “communal norms” framework seems irresolvable because it is irresolvable.

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

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.

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

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

Few serious observers can consider what we might call the “public square” platforms—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the public square’s library, Google—a boon to democracy. Nor are they a flourishing intellectual marketplace. Although it is tempting to shrug at their problems by comparing them to the heated partisan newspapers of the e... See more

town square that spans the entire globe. Our aim, then, is to show a way past this impasse. The two views ar

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

Barriers to entry : One way to avoid creating a platform crushed by questions about how to deal with bad actors is to raise the cost of entry. Barriers to entry may take the form of geographic localization, interest segmentation, high cost of discovery, or strong gatekeeping.