a lot of people have a romanticism they haven’t really dispelled around the idea of platform moderation which, to put it bluntly, keeps them from considering that asking for stricter moderation has nothing at all to do with the concept of fair enforcement of the rules they find sensible, but almost always means stricter moderation under current policies
like I genuinely struggle to think of a single social network where the moderation getting stricter correlated with the site getting nicer or even safer. the can’s getting kicked down the road at scale here, though, because a lot of the recent ID verification and nsfw crackdowns have sold themselves to the public on this basis
it’s one of those abstracts like “make the bus safer” that sounds nice until you find out how the people you’re petitioning would go about doing that, and then you’re late for work, getting pulled aside to answer a few questions about the pocket knife you forgot you were carrying, and posting “why are they doing this when they should be making the bus safer??”
Yeah
Been thinking this a lot lately, regarding the moderation of various groups I’m in
And also every time I see anyone advocating stricter rules or laws on anything
Stricter gun control: will be used to take away guns specifically from any minorities that might be suspected of wanting to use them in self-defense against the emerging dictatorship
Laws making it easier to remove children from abusive families: will be used to break up poor and non-white families on the flimsiest allegations, leaving rich white families to continue well-documented abuse undisturbed
Stronger punishment for rape and child molesting: accompanied by other laws twisting the definitions of those crimes to include pretty much every version of being LGBTQ. Plus also enforced in racist and classist ways. Because everything is.
Don’t know what an actual good solution would be.
But, like many of the problems where I don’t know that… I think it might become slightly less awful if people were less eager to always SAY that something-or-other is a good, obvious, simple solution.
Because it usually isn’t.