Social Platform Trust & Safety

But how do you monitor or take responsibility for what everyone says anywhere all the time? Well, you don’t. You can’t. Providing everyone with bandwidth and software keeps expense growth arithmetic. But if you try to exert any control over how it’s used then expenses become exponential too. It’s impossible to do within the business model. Everythi... See more

All of these ideas are free-speech friendly. They do not involve top-down censorship, but bottom-up user choice. Letting people police the content on their own pages and feeds is the natural next step for platforms that want to empower users rather than constantly surveil and censor them. Such features are also just common sense. No one has an inhe... See more

There are also the industrialized battalions running variously sophisticated ops to make the “public conversation” look like something it isn’t—to accelerate discord, to fake overwhelming support or opposition for an entity or idea, to make a group look stupid or dangerous-and-therefore-worthy-of-extermination, often by pretending to be a member an... See more

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more

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