Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Freedum of Speech

"Don't read the comments" was always said about most online newspaper sites, back when they had comments, and it was a reasonable thing to say, though if not for reasons most people understood. If you want to have a comments section or similar, you need some degree of moderation, and most newspapers never took that seriously (paid people money to do it). It has nothing to do with FREEDOM OF SPEECH in any sense whatsoever, it's simply that otherwise you're trying to have a pleasant conversation while 50 assholes are screaming into your ears.

I hate even writing this stuff because I think people to understand this, but lots of people like pretending not to understand when some rich asshole either doesn't or pretends not to understand it.

Anyway, journalists, instead of taking Musk's claims about TWITTER CENSORSHIP seriously, talk to anyone, anyone at all with any experience doing this, from 1990s USENET to reddit or facebook moderators to people who run the comments sections of very fine blogs.