6 ms·

This is interesting, given Automattic has one of the...weirdest views on free speech there is today. Near-absolute free speech, within the means of the law, wi

• JBReefer 7y ago
  Isn’t that majority opinion in America? I only see opposition to free speech in niche communities.
  • ekc 7y ago
    No, not for an online company, and especially not the exceptions it has.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • shadowmore 7y ago
    The majority of consumers, yes. Not majority of companies. Whether tech giants or smaller businesses, they all do advertisers' bidding, and the advertisers themselves have the insipid idea in their heads that having their ads show up alongside non-PC content is going to somehow associate their brand with that exact content, as if it's an endorsement.
    • kd5bjo 7y ago
      More than that, even if there are tools available for the advertisers to only target specific content they don’t want to be associated with a website that provides content they don’t like. IIRC, this was one of the reasons why Twitch was spun out of Justin.tv— advertisers liked the gaming content but not what was in the other categories.
    • henryfjordan 7y ago
      With the way Youtube, Twitch, and other large platforms share revenue with the content creators, the idea that an ad showing in front of content "associates" their brand with that video doesn't even go far enough. Those brands DO endorse that content directly with their money. There was an issue on YT where a video from ISIS containing a beheading was monetized. Advertisers were directly funding terrorism in that case (until YT interceded). The same happens all the time with other anti-humanitarian videos all the time. I agree that there has been some over-reaction, but let's not pretend it's not a problem.
  • jedberg 7y ago
    Most sites start that way. That was our policy on reddit too. If it was legal it was allowed. But you can see where that leads -- as you get bigger you attract a crowd that may be legal, but not one you want to support. The best analogy is that I support your right to spew your hate speech if you want, but I'm not going to open my house and let you do it in my living room. Most sites eventually decide that they don't want to be associated with that speech and clamp down.
    • tdb7893 7y ago
      Yeah, I love free speech but fundamentally social media is a product that I use and not having to deal with hate speech all the time is an important part of that product for me. At a certain point I've found moderation leads to a vastly better product to use than no moderation. For people where no moderation is important they can use a product without it (like some of the different *chans) but they just aren't as popular with people.
      • asdff 7y ago
        The fact that people reflexively spam online chats if given the chance should tell you all you need to know about handing every jackass with a keyboard a megaphone.
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      The Wordpress community is less tightly intertwingled than Reddit (or Twitter, for that matter) was. The chance of negative social interactions occurring goes up with the number of interactions, not the number of participants. In a dense community, this is O(N^2). In a sparse community, where participants subdivide into cliques that have little or nothing to do with each other, it approaches O(N). Specific social features all have different effects on the degree of interconnectedness on a site. In particular, things like unified user profiles, retweets, direct-link shortcuts to either user profiles or posts, navigational links, and real-time engagement increase the interconnectedness. Things like no-comment links (np.reddit), time delays, separate domain names for different subjects, subreddits, few links between different communities, separate user accounts, etc. reduce the interconnectness. Social sites exist on a spectrum from individual communities (4chan, HN, forums, etc.) to densely-connected but partitioned networks (Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Facebook) to publishing platforms (YouTube and Wordpress) to sitebuilders (SquareSpace, Wix, etc.) The latter end has virtually no problem with miscreants because it has virtually no social interaction; the former has a big problem with miscreants but has enjoyed the benefits of higher growth, higher engagement, and more ad dollars, except that if you go too far toward the community end, the community self-limits its size through rules and customs before it becomes big enough to monetize. Wordpress has benefitted from slower growth - because they're basically a publishing platform rather than a community, they don't face the same problems that being a community has. (They didn't get the benefits, either, which is why Facebook is a $500B company and they're not.)
  • opportune 7y ago
    No, I think most content platforms in the US ban things like Nazism, hate communities, etc.
  • hisnameisjimmy 7y ago
    Freedom of speech according to the law is different than private companies granting the same protections. Also, with a lot of these platforms, you're also getting freedom of distribution, which is not a right guaranteed by law.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Could you elaborate on the "odd exceptions"? I see nothing controversial about "near-absolute free speech, within the means of the law".