Elon Musk, Twitter, Moderation & Free Speech

Has Elon thought out what he's taking on with his Twitter takeover?

Elon Musk's planned takeover of Twitter is one of the most significant moves in a long time in the area of free speech/censorship, and the big tech domination of the information landscape that we've been covering closely on Rebel Wisdom.

Much of the commentary so far has been split along predictable political lines, with many left wingers already leaving Twitter in protest, excitement among the heterodox and right-leaning that Twitter may become a more sympathetic place. There has also been the usual revival of the conversation about free speech vs censorship, with the expectation that Elon's twitter would be less likely to censor certain viewpoints based on political bias, which has been one of the constant criticisms of Twitter, fairly or not.

But is this conversation missing the wood for the trees, and has even Elon Musk, who has shown himself willing to spend $44bn of his own money on buying Twitter, failed to think through the purchase in detail. Jim Rutt, friend of Rebel Wisdom, former head of the Santa Fe Institute for understanding complex systems, and long time veteran of online communities, believes that, from his tweets at least, Elon hasn't fully understood the dilemmas he will be faced with in terms of moderation/censorship.

These are questions that face anyone hosting any kind of online community, are all views and all behaviour permitted? Are certain types of content harmful, and if so what should be done about it? Should a line be drawn, and if so, who can be trusted to draw that line?

Jim outlined his proposal to Elon in his recent piece for Quillette, 'Musk and Moderation' where he outlined three different kinds of moderation. Content Moderation, Viewpoint Moderation and Decorum Moderation. Jim argues that the last one, Decorum (Conduct) Moderation is absolutely essential to creating healthy ecosystems, but that the other two need to be used extremely sparingly if at all, as nobody is in a position to know which currently unpopular or demonised ideas might one day be necessary and useful.

Rebel Wisdom just hosted a frank and sometimes robust exchange of views between Jim and the philosopher Aaron Rabinowitz, the host of the Embrace the Void podcast. In the wake of the 2016 election, Aaron set up an unmoderated discussion group called Monster Island, to host conversations between people of totally different political backgrounds. It failed quite spectacularly, as he outlines in his fascinating piece 'The Curse of Monster Island'.

As you'll probably know if you are reading this, my background is as a journalist for both BBC and Channel 4 News before venturing into the badlands of the alternative media space in 2018, so I have a direct sense of the different values and codes of conduct of both the legacy media and the alternative. I believe that the legacy media has far too narrow a set of viewpoints and perspectives, but that the alternative has its own issues, mostly that the incentive structure rewards creating echo chambers and giving the audience what they want rather than challenging them. In the alternative world the information ecosystem is equally broken because there is little incentive for hosts to challenge their guests, and the marketplace of ideas only works when ideas are actually challenged robustly.

So this is a huge interest of mine. Another aspect I've been struck by since creating a YouTube channel is how much passion, and yet how poorly thought out the subject of censorship/moderation is on YouTube. It's something like a religious belief structure that goes something like:

- The only cure for bad/harmful speech is more good speech.

- Censorship is a slippery slope and we should not even begin down it.

- Who would we trust to decide what is acceptable and what isn't.

These are powerful arguments, and there is a lot of truth to them, particularly the last, asking who should be empowered to decide, and Jim comes up with a complex, but elegant market-based system in his Quillette article that would incentivise Twitter to act fairly.

However, in total this position is something like a 'thought terminating cliche', and total free speech absolutism is not workable in practice. In a world of outright information warfare, and imminent AI-generated infinite misinformation/bullshit, the idea that 'good speech/good ideas' will automatically deal with and cancel out 'bad speech/bad ideas' is naive in the extreme. It's an item of religious faith that is at best unproven.

The fact that some ideas have far more visceral appeal and memetic impact, for example Q Anon, means that it's not an equal playing field, and the way that we create filter bubbles and echo chambers means that the good ideas and the bad ideas rarely actually mix in any meaningful way.

Plus, even the people arguing that no moderation/censorship should ever apply are just not thinking it through carefully enough. As a thought experiment, imagine that at your sister's wedding, someone comes in and starts verbally abusing all the guests and calling her a whore. Would you say that this is this person's first amendment free speech rights, or would you eject them immediately? This is a silly example, but a good one to illustrate that there is always a context to any decision, and that absolutism of any kind is unhelpful as it obliterates context.

Should child pornography be allowed on Twitter? If not, why not? What about instructions on how to make explosives? What about medical misinformation and claims of miracle cures? We have strict rules on what claims can be made in pharmacies or on bottles of medication, should we remove those restrictions? So why is a podcast different if that's where a lot of people are getting medical information from? These are questions that have to be wrestled with as content creators. Personally I feel a sense of responsibility towards truth as a curator, but not everyone does, and right now we are in an untenable situation where we are all at the mercy of the individual ethical judgements of content creators, with the incentive structures pulling in the other direction. See how much certain creators’ Patreon accounts increased when they started flirting with conspiratorial content.

What was refreshing about Aaron and Jim's conversation is that they have both spent time in the trenches of online communities and moderation and therefore have the battle scars to prove it. Free speech absolutism doesn't last very long in the real world, as Aaron explains in his Monster Island piece.

"Almost immediately we had to add the guideline “no deleting” as individuals started to delete sections of posts to mess with arguments or cover spots where they’d messed up. I call it a guideline because at this point we hadn’t had to actively enforce anything beyond stating the norms. What became clear though was that even the existence of those unenforced guidelines was an affront to some monsters’ sensibilities, and so they set to work testing the fences for weaknesses. They used all the typical troll techniques. Do things that are very close to breaking the guidelines and then force everyone to argue over whether they count. Look for other horrible things they could do that weren’t technically in violation of any guidelines, just to see if it would force us to develop new guidelines in response. It was always a losing battle, because there is a fundamental asymmetry between order and chaos, and chaos always has the advantage in tempo. One troll named Ryan Balch, whose name I have not changed, for reasons that will become apparent, openly declared his intentions to destroy Monster Island, just to prove he could. Several trolls joined his cause.

The result was several years of the purest banality of evil. We ended up needing to add rules against doxxing, blocking admins, explicit threats of physical violence, and taking photos from people’s personal profiles and photoshopping them into sex acts with military dictators. Meanwhile, the quality of discourse deteriorated from semi-functional, where some folks could have actual arguments or at least do a dance that looked vaguely like presenting evidence, to endless spam of the most disturbing memes you’ve thankfully never seen."

As you will see from the pinned comment on the YouTube video, for the first time I decided to make our own moderation policy at Rebel Wisdom explicit. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I do think that we should be very reluctant to delete anything that is well thought out, especially if it is critical. Good criticism is essential for health, and I welcome it even if sometimes it is difficult.

However, the kind of personal attacks, dismissals and drive-by-shootings that are common to YouTube comments sections are very unhelpful for many reasons. Not only does it make the comments section an unpleasant place to be, but it also becomes a feedback loop that fuels audience capture dynamics. To be honest even positive comments do this, in that they start to steer the channel in a particular direction.

In the dialogue between Aaron and Jim, Aaron is much more concerned about ideas/memeplexes like Q Anon, and would be more in favour of early moderation to prevent them growing. He gives pretty sound and reasonable reasons for this in the piece. I agree with him that Q Anon is something like a hugely powerful nihilistic attractor, a conspiracy singularity that is likely to have a major impact on the future trajectory of the US (as I laid out in this tweet thread).

Aaron knew he was coming onto 'enemy territory' given the free speech/heterodox bias of where Rebel Wisdom is situated in the information landscape. He knew that he would be seen as bringing a 'paternalistic bias' and being seen as pro censorship. Both of which are fair criticisms, but he would argue that some ideas are so dangerous that they need to be isolated and prevented from spreading. I see value in both his and Jim's perspective on this, and the key question for me is how much responsibility do we have and how do we strengthen people's critical thinking skills so they are less likely to be taken in by bad ideas.

As expected, Aaron has taken a lot of criticism in the comments thread. Again, much of it is well considered, but the problem from my perspective as the host of Rebel Wisdom, is that I would like to be able to host people from across the political and cultural spectrum for dialogues like this, this is one of the most important things necessary to solve the information/epistemic crisis of echo chambers/filter bubbles and the crisis of truth.

However we now have a situation where even the platforms we are using, like the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel, have a perceived political or cultural slant. There are no neutral venues. Aaron knew this and still appeared, and is thick skinned enough that it won't affect him, but others would take a look at threads like this and perhaps decide not to subject themselves to this reaction.

Peter Limberg has deliberately disabled the comments thread at The Stoa for exactly this reason, that he does not want to have both the praise and the criticism warping his judgement or affecting the way his project is seen. He wants it to be “the Switzerland of the culture war” to enable conversations across the divides.

I consider myself relatively disagreeable, but even so I definitely feel the weight of the comments thread, and am sure I have self-censored on occasion in the past, or avoided certain topics.

Yet it's highly unclear how representative any YouTube comments thread is of the Rebel Wisdom core audience, the kinds of people who leave comments are not necessarily representative of the viewer, they're more likely to have been triggered by the content and operating from a reactive place, and the way the YouTube algorithm works is that you're much more likely to attract casual viewers than podcast listeners who make a specific choice to listen to the episode.

FWIW, I think some of the criticism of Aaron are valid, he spoke over Jim quite a few times and seemed a bit more reactive than Jim, which didn't work in his favour in terms of the optics of the conversation. However he also made a lot of very good points in what was a rare and important meeting between representatives of different parts of the information landscape. To use Peter Limberg's excellent 'Memetic Tribes' framework, Jim was from the 'heterodox' tribe, and Aaron from the newly coined 'Critique Sphere' tribe that largely formed around opposition to the heterodox/Intellectual Dark Web tribe.

I am hoping that Substack will become a place for a higher quality engagement than YouTube. Please do sign up if you are not a subscriber, you will be able to comment here and hopefully we can raise the tone of debate.

I will return to Musk/Twitter in a future piece, for now I will quote the note I pinned below the video on my attitude to moderation, and please let me know in the comments here what you make of it:

Hey all - this was a great, robust conversation between different points of view and we hope you enjoy it.

Given the topic, and especially how heated the topic of free speech/censorship/moderation can become online, I thought it was worth spelling out our own attitude to moderation. We would love the comments thread to reflect the values we are trying to promote on Rebel Wisdom, of high quality engagement, awareness of our emotional reactions and trying to see things from multiple perspectives.

Disagreement is welcome, and we are very lucky that the comments threads under Rebel Wisdom videos are often very high quality (the recent Harrington/Kingsnorth for example).

But when disagreeing/criticising, please take the time and effort to lay out an argument, no low value drive by shootings, and no personal attacks. Personal attacks or low value criticism has an effect on the quality of the conversation we are hosting, and also affects how we are able to host certain guests in the future, and we want to be able to host people from across the political and cultural spectrum.

Perhaps also take the time to read the links in the show notes, Jim's article in Quillette, and Aaron's 'Monster Island' piece.

We will never delete critical comments that are well argued and considered, we welcome criticism. But we will delete comments that are rude, personal or otherwise just not moving the conversation forward in any meaningful way. Who decides that? Here, we do. We're providing all this content for free so we have the right to curate this space as we wish, and as the conversation spells out, some form of curation/moderation is necessary. Ideally this becomes a place that is self-moderating because of the high quality engagement from all of you, but this is also YouTube so we're not naive.

Short comments/quips also welcome of course.

Anyway, please enjoy the conversation and let us know what you think.

David.