Perhaps instead of a censorship arms race, we could stop trying to police speech & thought?
Is it better to push extremists and other weirdos to the echo-chamber fringe, to forums where they only ever encounter those that agree with them, or is it better to allow them into the public forum, where they will clearly find a huge number of people who disagree and argue with them, to show that their views are not so widely agreed with as they might come to dangerously believe in an echo chamber?
The above is assuming we only ever censor those who "should be censored"; imagine if social media were around during the civil rights movement and apartheid, whom would we then have censored, if you care to guess?
I know there are nuances here I haven't covered, but you can see that there is more to this than is seen at first glance.
We need some kind of un-governed mode of digital communication, as with real speech. No group can realistically stop you from shouting what you want to shout in public when you want to shout it, though you can obviously become a pariah or a prisoner shortly after. The same should be true online, free to face the consequences of your own speech, rather than not to speak at all.
It turns out that some ideas are toxic, as in, people get sucked into them, are too stubborn/whatever to admit they were wrong, and become rabid believers of nonsense.
Witness the adherents to the flat earth society or those that stringently don't believe we landed on the moon, never the Googler's sexist manifesto. Anti-semitic screeds like "the Jews run the banks and this is why you're poor!" frequently leak into open comment sections of your local news' website, or YouTube comments.
They're called echo chambers for a reason - semi-public forums become echo chambers because people won't seek out forums where people stringently disagree with them, they'll find supportive or semi-supportive forums, but in some cases those forums are stormfront or 4chan (where copying and pasting n-gger a million times passes for insightful). See also: HN's poor response to the Googler's firing. Vice.com had an infographic on Twitter about this, courtesy of MIT's media lab - https://news2-images.vice.com//uploads/2016/12/TwitterData1-.... Or multiple reports that certain groups of people have Fox News as their exclusive news outlet.
Even without social media, we see the same patterns in the past as we do today. Fun fact: Rosa Parks not the first person to stay seated at the front of the bus, but she had the unimpeachable character to deflect ad hominem attacks. It took a pre-organized movement just waiting for someone like Rosa Parks to refuse to move in order to catalyze change; homeless people, prostitutes, and drug addicts arrested for sitting at the front of the bus need not apply. We see this today, with Colin Kaepernick protesting "wrong" and that we could support Occupy Wallstreet/Black Lives Matter/Antifa if only they weren't protesting wrong.
When Twitter pretends to be powerless to do anything about death/rape threats to women journalists, the light of civilization is dimmed, ever so slightly. When entire classes of people disengage from mainstream discourse because they are being threatened by bodily harm, maybe it is possible that it is disingenuous to pre-conclude that anything possibly resembling censorship will result in a dystopian police state where African Americans are still denied the right to vote.
But again, in the absolutism of free speech, you're ignoring things like violent threats and racial slurs. And when you do that, you end up with something like 4Chan. Most people don't go there, for good reason.
And what consequence does someone who makes a lot of sock puppet accounts to send oven memes to Jewish people face? Pretty much none. Yet, those people are still faced with that constantly, and as a result, they choose not to engage. Now you've silenced their right to speech.
TBH, on Twitter (like on Facebook) you ultimately see posts from people you choose to follow. If you follow idiots, don't be surprised to see idiotic things. If you follow hateful people, don't be surprised to see hateful things.
That was the case until the @reply. Plus you probably don't want your followers to see idiots responding to your posts, unless they're following those idiots
It turns out, though, that lots of people you’d want to follow for interesting content also take a break from interesting, insightful, or funny tweets to have vitriolic rants.
Perhaps then the rules should enforce some sort of "theme" policy. I.e. if you're a gaming account, it has to stick to gaming content, etc. If it's political commentary, sure, and so forth. It might be difficult, but probably more do-able than the nebulous "abuse" rules that they currently have.
Really, it's what I hoped FB would turn into. I.e. you had "themed" pages, and follow them for posts regarding that theme. However, it seems that what happens is if a page and it's admins start getting any non-negligible amount of followers, they decide that it's their "right" to use it as a platform for opinions on unrelated matters. It's quite frustrating.
Is it better to push extremists and other weirdos to the echo-chamber fringe, to forums where they only ever encounter those that agree with them, or is it better to allow them into the public forum, where they will clearly find a huge number of people who disagree and argue with them, to show that their views are not so widely agreed with as they might come to dangerously believe in an echo chamber?
The above is assuming we only ever censor those who "should be censored"; imagine if social media were around during the civil rights movement and apartheid, whom would we then have censored, if you care to guess?
I know there are nuances here I haven't covered, but you can see that there is more to this than is seen at first glance.
We need some kind of un-governed mode of digital communication, as with real speech. No group can realistically stop you from shouting what you want to shout in public when you want to shout it, though you can obviously become a pariah or a prisoner shortly after. The same should be true online, free to face the consequences of your own speech, rather than not to speak at all.