I am selling this story to Boulder Weekly. I used to work with @dotMudge.

This is why Elon backed out of the twitter deal due to fake accounts.

Twitter can not care about that. It is just a platform.

Looks like HN doesn't either, sorry.

Does anyone know how companies like Twitter do moderation in countries like Pakistan. Hiring locals could be dangerous when coup happens. Hiring Pakistani expats (there’s plenty) tricky too as their families are still in danger (I assume their military is sophisticated enough to track whose relative works where). What is the ration of moderators to active user count. Do they specifically hire oppressed groups (i.e. Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans and Uighurs in China, etc) to shed a different opinion?

If OP simple claim that these people had misgendered him instead of threatening his life they would be forever banned from Twitter.

Yes yes, we're all gonna die because people are allowed to post on the internet. Decentralized messaging platforms should be illegal because they can't be moderated. You should only be able to host an internet service with a license and yearly federal inspections to make sure you're properly storing and backing up accountability logs of all users.

> blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will kill people based on tweets

This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not one of them.

You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that). This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an important field on the page).

Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in), are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely different value systems.

It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.

Twitter didn't have a problem banning Trump. Not so easy to pick sides when you're in another country's politics.

Surprised they didn't call him a Qadiani or Gustakh-e-rasul, that might have been actionable.

Extremely sad to hear. I don't think Twitter can be used to promote change. Or get your voice to the masses. They only care about propagating their own propaganda.

Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be anonymous.

As a US Citizen who has had their twitter posts censored, I consider myself to be a critic of the US Government who has been effectively silenced. At a certain point you have to decide whether you are willing to die for your cause, or live with your shame.

> I feel Twitter should have protected me, instead of protecting the henchmen of a facist regime bent upon silencing critics.

The West no longer deserves its reputation for fighting fascists. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Sympathies to you, man.

It is simple in many cases that are currently allowed on Twitter. They aren't making a good faith effort to solve the issue. Evidence: Allowing quote tweets directed to users who disabled replies. This is always used as a vector of further harassment.

From his description, he only suspect the government to be behind the troll accounts. So by blocking/fact checking the trolls Twitter wouldn't take any risk it seems. It seems more likely they are unable to understand or verify the messages of the trolls.

Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently, police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or meeting violence with direct self defense.

Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.

The corporation's minimum burden is to follow the law and abide by court orders.

That doesn't mean a corporation should be exempt from criticism when it does the wrong thing despite fulfilling that minimum burden. Laws are inadequate, and have loopholes.

Example: A corporation could literally make it its mission to funnel all profits into buying dirty coal and burning it for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing illegal about this in many countries.

  "They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private replacement for law enforcement."

They don't immediately act on such notices. That's part of the problem. They've pushed their customer service division onto the taxpayers of rich countries. And they've outright screwed the people on poor countries (Myanmar?) that have no recourse.

OP claims that synthetic commentators are making claims about them that are demonstrably untrue. This can be (and in other locales is) moderated in a politically neutral way.

For me it’s more of a: “this is what happens when you are ideologically inconsistent”. I don't feel like people are saying “Twitter shouldn’t”. I think the correct interpretation is “Twitter can’t”.

I thoroughly despise Twitter because they bless some issues and not others. Even though I support the end game of what they are trying to do (e.g. in the case of LGBTQ agenda topics), I vehemently disagree with the idea that the means to the end should involve policed speech and controlled narratives. Because that’s what fascists do.

So my problem is actually with Twitter. I pity the author. But I blame Twitter for creating the perception that they support the western rights of all individuals across the globe. Because they don’t, and can’t.

Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At a certain point people and organizations need to stop pretending that “both sides could in theory have a point” and actually take a stand.

“But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?”

I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.

138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990

https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257

At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i...

These risk levels are not alike.

Again, you have no clue how to handle this.

It's not about the money. Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people.

Then you are going to say, codify it and don't allow variations, which means a program / AI can do a better job, which is what most of these firms are optimizing far.

Unless you have personally solved that issue or have an example of someone solving it, it is literally arm-chair critiquing

  "Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people."

The International Human Rights Foundation (IHRF) seems to be an NGO based in New York, perhaps with offices in India as well, but they don't seem to be an organ of the Indian government. The author of this article quotes a tweet trying discredit the IHRF by claiming they are "registered in India" (might be true, but so what?)

> Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?

Not all speech is free speech. In the US, there are limitations, such as harmful or offensive content, and this includes speech that is both false and dangerous.

This is not a free speech issue. The OP is being stalked. Fundamentally, stalking is a threat of injury or death, as well as unwanted surveillance by an individual or group, and stalking behavior includes precisely this type of harassment. The OP's life is in obvious danger. This is a criminal issue.

If the OP is in the US, I'd recommend researching how to request political asylum.

Unsolicited advice to all: stay off of any social media unless it includes anonymity. Protect your identity. In the US, only two things can happen to you by participating in non-anonymous social media:

#1) nothing

#2) you get fired

Pakistan has raised the stakes and turned #2 into "you get abducted and killed."

Fuck Twitter. What a shitty platform. If I wanted to effect political change in a third world country, I would found a secret society, secretly install a printing press somewhere, and run it 24/7. That is how you kill fascists.

Get out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat.

If social medias don't want to sweat the small stuff -- accountability for being the disease vector for genocide, pogroms, and personal vendettas -- then they shouldn't operate in that capacity.

> You don’t want to leave Pakistan

My read is that he's in New York, but has family still in Pakistan.

The ask here is not for twitter on itself be some kind of safe place. It is for twitter as a company or platform to stop enabling this sort of thing. Or at least, enable it less.

(TRIGGER WARNING: I write long sentences.)

"Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere."

Along with the rest of the reply, this is some 100% GRADE A cynicism right here.

To this cynicism - clearly there's a danger to a named journalist just from the 'offended' party reading the product of their journalism (in this case Twitter posts or posts they distribute via Twitter posts), but if as the OP suggests, the government is using Twitter to produce an erroneous record and public justification for extra-judicial violence against journalists and political foes, and that without this ability to use Twitter to manipulate the narrative surrounding an individual target, they would not be as emboldened to perpetrate the violence against that individual, then the use of Twitter by the harassing party here is clearly enabling violence, moving the risk from a general threat to a political journalist's safety to a clear and present danger to the individual.

Waving proverbial hands at this by noting that journalism can be dangerous if the party that doesn't like it can see your journalism, and therefore, promoting, distributing, or publishing it via Twitter isn't Twitter's problem because the threat arises from the the distribution in general, not the medium, ignores the role the author suggests Twitter plays in the manipulation of the public sentiment towards targeted individuals for the purpose of eliminating a critical level of moral outrage that exists as potential blowback and might otherwise provide some degree of safe cover and prevent the extra-judicial violence the 'aggrieved' wish to subject the target to.

Aslo: I'm surprised Twitter doesn't have rules that restrict the use of "parody" accounts against non-verified (or non-verfiable) accounts. I can't imagine that Twitter in the US hasn't previously been confronted with this issue by high-schoolers bullying and or cyber-stalking peers on Twitter with anonymous "parody" accounts.

Back to the cynicism: "Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.

You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.

All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here."

What couldn't this be applied to? Think you're child's school bus operator is being negligent by not installing seat belts? Sure, you complaining might help, but the real fault lies with you for letting her get on the bus.

Think the coal mine you work for is shirking their safety responsibilities? Sure, you can complain, but the real problem is you bring willing to go down that mine.

Think too many 737-Maxes are falling out of the sky? Go ahead and complain, but the real fault is yours for flying.

Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.

They said nothing about Twitter's behavior being strange. They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.

What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).

Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well written article like that on the frontpage of this site, but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem. Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well lately. Good riddance.

So Twitter provides a platform that actively facilitates defamation, then the individual and justice system has to spend lots of time and money addressing it, then Twitter gets to pocket all the ad revenue from the entire horrible ordeal? That is not fair or just, even if it is legal. And what about people in countries that don't have a functioning justice system. Twitter assists the defamer in screwing over the individual, making money in the process, and there is actually no path to justice? It's a worldview that's only possible to hold from a position of privilege.

This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It could be the whole thing was written expressly for the purpose of asylum.

Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.

The pace of social media is insurmountable. More information is generated per second on social media than any justice system could process in a year.

He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something.

So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less.

If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely.

I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."

I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually.

One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things.

It is a completely reasonable criticism.

they need to understand the politics of the places they operate in, if they can’t then they shouldn’t operate there - we already saw what happened with facebook in myanmar

This is a good point and I think pretty well captures the "and what is Twitter supposed to do about it" angle.

To say "well, thus and such comedian is connected to the regime, that's why he has tweeted about me," well, what level of investigation is Twitter supposed to do that they a) disprove the allegations lobbed at OP (working for RAW provocateurs) and b) are able to support the allegation against the comedian's intent, and thus prove that the whole interaction is as the OP says it is?

Doing so goes beyond moderation, it goes beyond fact checking, it's nearly at the level of a personal background check or a trial.

What is being asked of Twitter seems totally outside the realm of what a social media company should be doing. It seems like OP wanted to do the right thing, to speak truth to power, but is now realizing that power was listening.

An account that publicly exposes your identity is not the right place to antagonize people with machine guns if you are not willing to take on personal risk, and that has nothing to do with moderation policies.

> Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him detained, removing them will do nothing, because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose.

This is nonsense. That's like letting someone use your gun to shoot someone because they'd be able to find a gun somewhere.

So basically meh, they'll torture him anyway?

That would require caring about the welfare of other humans more than caring about money/political "power", which most huge corporate entities these days (and the governments they own) have already proven time and again that they do not.

I doubt they make very much money off of Pakistani users. It might even be a small net loss. I don't think twitter publishes ARPU per country though, so this is speculation to some degree.

> This is why this perspective is so privileged. You're assuming people have access to a functioning legal system through which to correct the issue. In some rich countries, that'd cost a lot of time and money, which many people don't have. And in some poor countries without a functioning state, that's not even an option at all.

I'm not assuming that they are. They may very well in fact not be, but they are an American-based company with a mostly functional legal system so that is the rules they go by. I for one thing it would be much more dangerous for Twitter to play judge, jury and executioner but it seems like that is almost what you're advocating for here.

> It's also an inversion of morality. You're putting 100% of the onus onto the small time individual to correct the issue, and 0% of the onus onto the large corporation that actively facilitated the harassment in the first place by engineering viral mechanics that encourage mobbing.

I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing. They have privacy controls and you can also block people. If someone is making threats those can be reported to Twitter. Evidenced-base coordinated campaigns can be considered conspiracy and reported as such. Saying things you don't like isn't a conspiracy. Telling people where you live so they can harm you is strictly against their ToS.

Sometimes standing up for and defending yourself takes utilizing the rights given to you by law the best you can. The more you practice it the better you get at it. It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue, and even then in there yes rightfully so there are legal remedies to report these types of violations.

>because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose

A response should be delivered quickly and efficiently, and in no uncertain terms. Filling it with heart and soul just gives false hope that some kind of appeal to emotion can be achieved. But it cannot.

That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner.

Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.

It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.

Political crap follows the same pattern.

If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"

The premise seems more about how easily Twitter can be used to support a coup, suppress journalistic voice, oppress people, and push propaganda.

I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is failing to be.

Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a bit better at it.

Isn't there a word for the fallacy that something can improve a situation and should, but because it can't solve it we should ignore that it's improvement is important ethically?

Total strawman. Nobody is saying Twitter should act as a shield. They're saying Twitter shouldn't actively facilitate that outcome by providing a platform for targeted harassment and lies.

Nobody wanted Facebook to stop a genocide in Myanmar. They just wanted Facebook to not serve the role of actively encourage that outcome.

And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder?

The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.

In practice that would mean the third world would get cut off as not worth it and many complaints about information apartheid or similar condemning terms.

How could a business possibly account for that in a way that doesn't make doing business over the Internet logistically impossible?

>You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad?

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.

>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.

The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.

>it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.

Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.

>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.

I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.

>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.

So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.

>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.

I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.

>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.

I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.

    This person is an Israeli agent

    We think this person is an Israeli agent, because they've been spotted talking to Jewish people in New York.

    1. Provide more transparency on the source of the information.
    2. Provide a way for the targets of Tweets to provide their counterpoint.
    3. Increase the requirement for tweets that attack a target to provide justification.

No, but they could roll out a pilot program for establishing local moderating offices and as part of that program establish a list of qualifying criteria for where they are willing to place such.

They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of best practices as its standard and this got adopted by the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.

Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory relationship to such countries, so such countries have no motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and things begin to change.

Well you told me my initial interpretation of what you said was wrong, so I tried to find an alternative meaning behind what you were saying. But now I see my initial interpretation was accurate. You are indeed saying that, if Twitter isn't omniscient, then it won't be able to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize because it's not possible moderate perfectly. This is the just the perfect solution fallacy.

  "free marketplace of ideas"

This is a culture war talking point that is ignorant of the reality of social psychology and the social contagion of bad memes. Suicide contagion, stochastic terrorism from ISIS supporters in Europe and white nationalists in the US who were mostly radicalized online, the rise of populism in the US since 2015, wokeness ideology spreading to all institutions in a few years. You think you can just shine a light on bad ideas and they'll go away, but the exact opposite is true if they play to people's tribal instincts and resentments. Heck the rise of fascism last century was partly memetic propagation due to the mass production of culture. If you want to form a worldview based on social psychology, then it should actually be based on social psychology.

  "no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation"

  "Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context"

I have a hard time taking this position seriously -- when did you come to this conclusion? Have you put yourself in the position of someone living in these countries? Some random person having their access to the rest of the world just cut off like that? For their own good?

I agree - I think demanding Twitter stop its service in countries where tweets are likely to cost people lives is a much more realistic goal, and one I would support.

>You're insisting on drawing a rigid binary of "inconsistent" versus "perfectly consistent"

It is a binary distinction. Something that's almost completely consistent is not completely consistent, therefore it's inconsistent. I'm not saying it's equally as inconsistent as something that's totally inconsistent, but it is inconsistent. Maybe you're interested in measuring the degree to which things are consistent, but I only care about whether they're consistent.

>the only alternative is "inconsistent" which is categorically worse than than no moderation by sheer virtue of the binary category that it's assigned to. This is the perfect solution fallacy.

It's not, and I will tell you why: in my opinion, an okayish criterion that's applied consistently is better than a good criterion that's applied inconsistently. The best compromise is the one where all the parties are left equally dissatisfied. And why is that? It's because it's easier to convince everyone that one is being fair than that one is taking the optimal course of action.

>Right, so if literal authoritarian Islamists became the dominant paradigm and Sharia was imposed on you by force you have no problem with it simply because that's what won in the marketplace of ideas.

That depends on what you mean by "have no problem". Would I think everyone is completely stupid and possibly seek to move to some place else? Yes. Would I take any steps at all to prevent that, beyond possibly arguing against such ideas? No.

>this is nihilistic moral relativism

I'm a moral nihilist, yes. That is to say, I reject that idea that morality exists, at least by some interpretations of the word.

>I know you conservative types don't really believe in moral relativism, it's probably just disingenuous posturing because you know right-leaning opinions tend to be banned more often in social media in the current moment, so it's helpful to adopt a stance on censorship that seems more principled and logically consistent. The left did this in the 1960s. If it was just ISIS propaganda being banned and nothing else I know I wouldn't be hearing any of these nihilistic relativistic arguments.

1. I have no idea where you got that I'm conservative, but of all the labels I would apply to myself, that's not one of them.

2. There's no point in continuing if you're going to unilaterally ascribe beliefs to me and assume ulterior motives. You can just imagine how it's going to go and pretend that you're correct.

So, what part of my position do you not understand? I've consistently advocated for them to improve their moderating practices here.

It's other people who insist that is unrealistic to whom I have replied "If they can't handle the task, they do have the option to simply leave this market instead of making excuses about how they have no choice but to go along with (various bad things)."

I'm not impressed with such excuses. A business located outside of a country with serious problems of this sort is not required to operate in that market. If they choose to, they should make an effort to make moderating policies that reasonably account for the fact that people there have issues not commonly seen in someplace like the US.

It's bizarre because nobody believes that when it comes to anything else.

Take any crime, such as murder. It is impossible to ban and punish murder perfectly fairly. Some inconsistencies and unfairness is guaranteed. That doesn't mean we should stop enforcing all criminal sentencing just because it's not perfectly fair.

You bring up the social consequences of perceived unfairness and the Streisand effect. These are social psychology arguments which you've previously said you're not looking at. Well it's good that you're taking social psychology seriously because that's the focal point of this, and I refer back to the previous things I've said on that.

>You think murder sentencing can be "fair" and "consistent", but censorship can only be "unfair" and "inconsistent".

I think that murder sentencing can be fair. It's not, but murder is not something that should go unpunished either way.

I think censorship is not and has never been fair. Not only that, historically the point has been the opposite: to oppress. I think "well-intentioned censorship" like you propose is so easy to pervert that it's worse than nothing.

>We've already been over this.

And we're going over it again because the first time around you apparently found my viewpoint incomprehensible.

>I am not a moral relativist or moral nihilist. I will advocate to ban strings of words that have a non-trivial probability of causing stochastic terrorism or genocide

But you're not alone in the world. While you're happy to have those strings banned and none others, other people will want to use the same systems that were put in place in order to ban strings, to ban some strings that you may not care about one way or another, and others that you think should not be banned.

>by the same logic that we choose to ban direct calls to violence

I don't think calls to commit crime need to be banned. I don't think shouting fire in a crowded theater need to be banned. It's one each person to act accordingly in each situation, and not be moved to action by the first idiot who says something stupid. If the justification for censorship of ideas is censorship of calls to violence, I'm fine with having none.

But see what I mean? If I tell you "I'm not opposed to banning calls to violence" I'm opening the door for you to come back with "well, then what about these other strings that have similar effects?" Do you not see how the same can be done to you?

>This isn't relevant.

It is relevant. Unlike crime, which most people at most rarely feel like committing, almost everyone has an opinion that someone else would find objectionable and would rather they didn't voice.