#content moderation at scale is impossible

You know what the stupidest part about Musk wanting to reinstate Trump’s Twitter is? It actually violates Musk’s stated goal for Twitter: to make a place where there are transparent rules that are fairly applied.

The problem with Trump’s social media bans is that they landed after he had repeatedly, flagrantly flouted the rules that the platforms used to kick off *lots* of other people, of all political persuasions.

Musk’s whole (notional) deal is: “set some good rules up and apply them fairly.” There are some hard problems in that seemingly simple proposition, but “I would let powerful people break the rules with impunity” is totally, utterly antithetical to that proposition.

Of course, Musk’s idea of the simplicity of setting up good rules and applying them fairly is also stupid, not because these aren’t noble goals but because attaining them at scale creates intractable, well-documented, well-understood problems.

I remember reading a book in elementary school (maybe “Mr Popper’s Penguins”?) in which a person calls up the TV meteorologist demanding to know what the weather will be like in ten years. The meteorologist says that’s impossible to determine.

This person is indignant. Meteorologists can predict tomorrow’s weather! Just do whatever you do to get tomorrow’s weather again, and you’ll get the next day’s weather. Do it ten times, you’ll have the weather in 10 days. Do it 3,650 times and you’ll have the weather in 10 years.

Musk - and other “good rules, fairly applied” people - think that all you need to do is take the rules you use to keep the conversation going at a dinner party and do them over and over again, and you can have a good, 100,000,000 person conversation.

There are lots of ways to improve the dumpster fire of content moderation at scale. Like, we could use interoperability and other competition remedies to devolve moderation to smaller communities - IOW, just stop trying to scale moderation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

And/or we could adopt the Santa Clara Principles, developed by human rights and free expression advocates as a consensus position on balancing speech, safety and due process:

https://santaclaraprinciples.org/

And if we *must* have systemwide content-moderation, we could take a *systemic* approach to it, rather than focusing on individual cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave

I disagree with Musk about most things, but he is right about some things. Content moderation is terrible. End-to-end encryption for direct messages is good.

But this “I’d reinstate Trump nonsense”?

Not only do *I* disagree with that, but so does Musk.

Allegedly.