@woozle Excellent bit at the end of Doctorow's New Yorker profile on content moderation:

I worry that, because of the attacker’s advantage, the people who want to break the rules are always going to be able to find ways around them, and that we’re never going to be able to make a set of rules that is comprehensive enough to forestall bad conduct. We see this all the time, right? Facebook comes up with a rule that says you can’t use racial slurs, and then racists figure out euphemisms for racial slurs. They figure out how to walk right up to the line of what’s a racial slur without being a racial slur, according to the rule book. And they can probe the defenses. They can try a bunch of different euphemisms in their alt accounts; they can see which ones get banned or blocked, and then they can pick one that they think is moderator-proof.

Meanwhile, if you’re just some normie who’s having racist invective thrown at you, you’re not doing these systematic probes—you’re just trying to live your life. And they’re sitting there trying to goad you into going over the line. And as soon as you go over the line they know chapter and verse. They know exactly what rule you’ve broken, and they complain to the mods and get you kicked off. And so you end up with committed professional trolls having the run of social media and their targets being the ones who get the brunt of bad moderation calls. Because dealing with moderation, like dealing with any system of civil justice, is a skilled, context-heavy profession. Basically, you have to be a lawyer. And, if you’re just a dude who’s trying to talk to your friends on social media, you always lose.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do

I think Doctorow's touching on a universal truth: that any rules-based system ultimately ends up being a sort of barristered hell. It's why content moderation is so damned context-sensitive. And also why and how extremists on both sides of a divide can drive out moderates and give rise to a highly-partisan shriekfest. Closely related to SSC's "Toxoplasma of Rage":

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

@pluralistic

#CoryDoctorow #NewYorker #ContentModeration #Lawyering #ToxoplasmaOfRage

Cory Doctorow: The Swerve

People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make.

These boundaries are the point of no return, the point at which it won’t mat­ter if we yank the wheel, because the bus is going over the cliff, swerve or no.

Focus on the swerve.

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31992218

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #BusinessAsUsual #TheSwerve #CoryDoctorow #LetsRoll #MassCivilResistance

"A decentralized, interoperable Internet is an explicit tradeoff: you lose the power that comes from convincing the platforms to eliminate the speech that disturbs or upsets you, but you gain the power to move to an online community where speech policies are to your liking...and you still get to talk to people who want different speech policies."

- #CoryDoctorow, 2021

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interoperability-some-thoughts-peanut-gallery

#FreeSpeech #decentralization #moderation