Before we can solve "moderation," we need to be clear what the goal is. Twitter has very handy Unfollow and Block features. Therefore, moderation on Twitter means stopping people from saying things to people who want to hear those things.
This raises an obvious question. If the people hearing the ideas manifestly want to hear them, who is being served by the moderation?
One possibility is the moderator. It's evident that Twitter executives, or people who influence them, don't want certain ideas to spread. But why? One possibility is that they believe these ideas to be false or "harmful" (whatever that means).
They believe the the masses are easily duped and that counter-arguments are unlikely to be sufficiently persuasive. If only a minority of people are easily duped, then false ideas tend to burn out within a small radius as they are exposed to counter-argumentation and common sense.
But if the masses are putty in the hands of bad idea creators, then a wise and disinterested moderator has a role to play. He can spot the bad idea and cut it off before it spreads.
But can a wise and disinterested moderator exist? If company executives faced no outside pressures, then it's theoretically possible. But we can see clearly this does not exist in the real world. The US Congress and Whitehouse have not been shy about making very specific moderation demands of Twitter, backed by serious and credible threats. As a result, correct ideas are bound to be moderator out and bad ideas allowed to spread.
(A few hundred years of political philosophy, as captured in the founding documents of the US, make it clear why we don't want government to play any moderation role whatsoever.)
In my opinion, the wisdom of the masses combined with opportunities for vigorous counter beats centralized moderation by a very large margin.
This raises an obvious question. If the people hearing the ideas manifestly want to hear them, who is being served by the moderation?
One possibility is the moderator. It's evident that Twitter executives, or people who influence them, don't want certain ideas to spread. But why? One possibility is that they believe these ideas to be false or "harmful" (whatever that means).
They believe the the masses are easily duped and that counter-arguments are unlikely to be sufficiently persuasive. If only a minority of people are easily duped, then false ideas tend to burn out within a small radius as they are exposed to counter-argumentation and common sense.
But if the masses are putty in the hands of bad idea creators, then a wise and disinterested moderator has a role to play. He can spot the bad idea and cut it off before it spreads.
But can a wise and disinterested moderator exist? If company executives faced no outside pressures, then it's theoretically possible. But we can see clearly this does not exist in the real world. The US Congress and Whitehouse have not been shy about making very specific moderation demands of Twitter, backed by serious and credible threats. As a result, correct ideas are bound to be moderator out and bad ideas allowed to spread.
(A few hundred years of political philosophy, as captured in the founding documents of the US, make it clear why we don't want government to play any moderation role whatsoever.)
In my opinion, the wisdom of the masses combined with opportunities for vigorous counter beats centralized moderation by a very large margin.