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"Crime sure is hard to stop."

"Well, just make everything legal."




Allow legal things. Block illegal things.

It seems crazy that it's impossible to find a major platform that has this policy.


Pornography is legal.

If Facebook allowed pornography, it would quickly overwhelm the platform due to engagement metrics.

It would make the platform unusable.

Vile hate speech? Completely legal.

But its mere presence would turn away huge numbers of users.

It would make the platform unattractive and hurt the business.

It is in the platform's best interest to block otherwise legal things.


> If Facebook allowed pornography, it would quickly overwhelm the platform due to engagement metrics.

You're arguing with hypotheticals even through real world examples exist.

Reddit has lots of porn and it's nowhere to be seen on the frontpage.

Allowing something doesn't mean you shouldn't classify it and filter it.


I specifically mentioned Facebook because of how Facebook's news feed algorithm works. It's engagement based, and those algorithms are easy to saturate to specific types of content.

Reddit has a fundamentally different approach to front-page content and discovery, and moderation in general.

But even on Reddit, which is fairly permissive, they have hard boundaries which have little, if anything, to do with the "law".


But this isn't true. Social media was pretty much a free for all (except for porn) until 2015ish and it was growing rapidly the whole time. The whole argument that this type of content will drive away users is completely contradicted by history.


Social media was not a free for all before 2015. I … don't know why you think that is true.

This story is from 2013: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/2013/06/facebook-and-...

Maybe super early it was a free for all, but it had a lot less users then. The impacts mattered less.

These interventions became important as the companies grew, and needed to attract the largest possible number of users.

There are places with VERY open content policies. You can join them today.

Those places attract a niche audience and I'd wager always will.


Seems like a good way to may Facebook much much worse

It's not hard to see why major platform has such a policy

Also I don't want people to get blocked for pirating stuff. Or weed.


> "Crime sure is hard to stop."

> "Well, just make everything legal."

It's a bit of a straw man to say that GP meant we shouldn't enforce the law in the real world.

GP wasn't very clear what he meant, but presumably he's referring to not doing excessive moderating and instead rely on the law mandates.

More ~~laws~~rules, less justice. When you have a lot of internal policies, you're inevitably going to have ridiculous results such as this one. If you only follow the legal rules (which you have to) there's less unfairness.

(Of course, you have to have some internal policies such as not allowing spam, but the point is: the fewer onerous rules, the better.)


"Only worry about the law" is not a viable moderation strategy.


Well, but that is literally one of the arguments for legalizing drugs.

The issue here is more like defining what crime is, though, not stopping it. Stopping stuff on FB is easy. Figuring out what to stop, is hard. Figuring out if a disputed case should have been stopped is hard. For the 'real world' we have parliaments and courts, but there's FB has only the equivalent of police, not the other parts of the system. It is, in effect, a police state.


Yes, some things are hard and impossible to get right 100% of the time.


What about only stopping (moderating) crime, then?




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