Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
Without trust in the decision-maker, trust in the process breaks down, and the only important question becomes, “Who decides?”
Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become di... See more
Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
But if this ideal of freedom may be absolute within its domain, this is possible only because the domain is narrow, tightly limited by rigorous conditions for entering it.
Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
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
Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
Putting aside the mechanics of algorithmic feeds, it feels like there’s often a mismatch between the international user base of a platform and the national “democracy” about which these points are being made
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
Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
3 ways that rules have “legitimacy” - Traditional authority, charismatic authority, and legal validity / objective rationality
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
Jon Askonas • 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.
Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
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
A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such wo... See more
Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
reputation / karma systems
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