I’ve only skimmed this so far, but while I firmly believe that the fetishizing of freedom of expression is causing real issues in our world, I appreciate Masnick’s critique. I expect I’ll always be more keen on regulation than he is, but that doesn’t make him wrong in the points he’s making here.

“Mentioning names both is and isn’t allowed. It’s a quantum superposition of content moderation that only collapses when observed by Musk himself.” 😂😂😂

Bookmarking for future research. What a fascinating (if frustrating) interplay of social media platforms and religious authority.

I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

Musk ne s’intéresse à la liberté d’expression que quand il peut en profiter.

Good for Platformer.

As usual, I find Masnick’s recap of this recent nonsense helpful in terms of summary and interpretation.

Don’t love it when platforms shut down tools because they don’t like outside research.

Gift Link

There are legitimately difficult content moderation decisions, but this is not one of them. Shame on Substack for this approach.

Is this the same feature Elon says will be sufficient for keeping Alex Jones in check?

How a platform is managed has real consequences.

Content moderation is a good thing.

Roth’s perspective is valuable here. Scary stuff.

I’ve instinctively never liked t.co links, and this demonstrates what the problem with them are.

Look, if an automated process could save human moderators from the awful work they have to do, I’d be all for it. I’m unconvinced that GPT-4 could do it, though.

So many important points in this piece.

Everyone excited about generative AI needs to account for this kind of thing. We don’t pay enough attention to digital labor and the dehumanizing aspects of content moderation.

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.

I get that it’s straightforward language that everyone will get, but I think “uncensored” is the wrong word here. Content moderation is not (necessarily) censorship, and content moderation is good and helpful for tools like generative AI.

Helpful summary by Masnick; bookmarking for later.

A good glimpse at content moderation, and why it’s important to do it correctly.

This is a neat game that shows how difficult content moderation is. Excited to have my content management students play it in the Fall.

Content moderation is hard, and it’s especially hard at scale. Because AI makes doing things at scale easier, it necessarily makes content moderation harder.

I’m tired of reading Twitter news, but I’m professionally obligated to do so, no matter how dumb it gets.

This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem.