RationalWiki on face masks

As I said, this ban seemed like a pretty good Schelling point. "Don't organise riots using our private service, thank you very much". I've never really seen in history a democracy turning into a dictatorships due to slippery slopes like these (if one has an example please provide it) usually the power shift happens first, and then the dictatorship and secret police might start with the easiest target first, but the corruption of the core principles always came first.

Edit: I guess the Schelling point only works if 1) it's a stricter standard politicians are held to 2) there is a clear way to define riots from protests. A Schelling point stating that if you're a politician you can't say "great, do it again" when a protest you sponsored turned violent seem to work fine, one that goes "random people or activist said to protest, in the last protest there were episodes of violence, thus we banned him for inciting people to riot and be violent" is clearly more sketchy. I guess I feel safer on social medias pulling this stuff on politicians rather than ordinary people because politicians are a lot harder to silence, and unfairness toward them would be a lot more easy to notice. 

But as I mentioned, ordinary people were being banned for praising episodes of violence long before this, so we jumped that point already. 

To me, it makes a lot of sense that politicians should be held to stricter standards of ordinary people anyway, since their words have a lot more weight and we saw again and again that people go crazy if they are just left free to say whatever it suits them. End of the edit.

If the social medias didn't ban Trump once he got this far, well.. that also would have set a precedent, one that, as an Italian, rings a lot more alarm bells to me. Because then any politician can try something like this, and this is exactly how we got fascism the first time. 

I mean, if we want to talk about Slippery slopes, a president openly refusing to accept elections and calling for a popular march on the government is jumping headfirst down one, rather than taking a small step. A fence had to be built, since freedom of expression used this way destroys freedom pretty fast once the process starts and the right factors are in place. 

Also, suppose the platforms then tried to coordinate on a ban of a less... well, obvious target. The politicians would not miss it and would immediately coordinate to have them back down, the offended party would call every resource it has if threatened this way, and it's likely that even the enemy party would join in on the effort, I'd expect them to be able to figure out the next obvious steps if they don't. 

Why would social medias even want such a war with powerful figures who can reduce their profit and that the ban of costs them users and backlash every time? 

So all in all, not banning Trump was a move a lot more dangerous for slippery slopes.

And that's just the overt bans. What about coordinated shadowbans? Coordinated removal of positive mentions, and promoting of negative mentions on the front pages?

This worries me a lot more. In all of this, I'd hardly ever say that the social medias platforms are the good guys. 

However, this strategy is a lot more effective if people aren't worrying about the overt bans. If you want to control society and power from the shadows, the last thing you worry is people suddenly becoming all worried on how you do things and who you grant access to. 

So I see the Trump ban as something Twitter was forced into by the circumstances, likely to avoid politicians and sponsors wanting to regulate what you can say on the "evil, fascist ridden social media platforms" themselves. 

How exactly social medias choose to promote and don't promote content has been worrying me for a while already. Sadly, normal information medias do it too. Free informations isn't really as free as people would hope, people, ideas, politicians and corporations have been facilitated or impeded in reaching the public with sketchy reasons for decades now, very few people noticed. 

You might want to have a look at research on media accountability and the propaganda model. If you have heard the controversies on it, I'd jump ahead and agree that Norman and Chomsky made questionable decisions in their research on it, but the model validity has still been proven beyond doubt and research from other authors confirmed it again. I confirmed it myself in a research for my master thesis.

On a side note: I think the whole slippery slow threat for democracy has been set as an argument inside the American culture during the cold war, where everything too "lefty" was argued to be a slippery slope for communism, often with "first the government steps into business a bit, then they take your home and then bam, you are a starving soviet peasant". I've heard this reasoning more times than I could count, but it's not at all how the communist revolution, or the fascist revolutions happened.

It might also be than in Europe the ban on fascism and such has long been in place so nobody worries about it turning some other ways, but there seems to be a cultural component on how worried people are toward the excesses of freedom of speech vs the dangers of limiting freedom of speech. 

Second Edit: I had a nagging suspicions I was doing something wrong in this reply. After thinking about it, I feel I've focused too much on the "banning Trump, right or wrong" side of the question.

I guess what I am trying to say is that from a larger perspective, I see this as a shift of power: away from elected politicians, towards colluding social media monopolies. People applaud, because the first nuke landed on Trump. Okay, cool. Who is next? And next? Who decides? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? 

This is really a good point. 

I still think politicians aren't the ones at risk here, and that letting excesses slide is more dangerous than stopping them, but as social medias start taking on themselves the role of "guardians" of their content, there should be a lot of focus on the decision processes involved, there should be a lot of caution in how this problem is managed (a "shoot first, ask later" as Youtube did with copyright issues and monetisation would be a disaster), and there should be a lot more transparency in how these companies generally do stuff since they basically have to power to shape society as they desire.

This feels to me as the key point of the issue, the key point to be discussed, rather than the too abstract "freedom of speech vs censorship" and the too specific "banning Trump right or wrong". 

The key question in your post seemed to be regarding how scientific controversies, where evidence is pointing away from consensus, should be handled by these platforms, which was more on the level that I think should be discussed, I've accidentally moved the focus away from that first by asking about which examples you were thinking of. Then we moved further from it, I think.

I guess a policy I kinda see as okay on the specific issue of factual accuracy is kinda like 

• Flagging is better than censoring. Use the first if it seems it can be enough.
• While in an emergency, posts contradicting official authorities guidelines are flagged as such. (The CDC wasn't likely being stupid about masks, if people knew masks would have made them safer from day one then there would have been more deaths, not fewer, because masks would have not been available where they'd have saved most lives. Scientific consensus is rarely wrong, and if the official authorities aren't following it the problem is much bigger than a social network policy can hope to fix. Once or twice you'd accidentally flag people being right, but science doesn't move forward by arguing on social networks during times of emergencies, and on average you'd flag a lot more vaccine deniers than rationalists).
• While not in an emergency, follow a cautionary principle that limits censorship and flagging to the most extreme cases. Use it only where the false information is proven as false beyond doubt, and the risk it represents for the public is severe.
• Keep the decision process as transparent and public as possible.

I feel this guideline is still too lax to hold back most forms of political fake news, which are a huge problem. But if you try to regulate something that can be that capillary, abuses become exponentially more likely, so I don't think I can think up an effective policy if I haven't studied the problem in a lot more details.

The policy for banning users that incite to violence, racism or stuff is a different subject yet, but I guess it should still follow a cautionary principle to limit censorship.

Facebook seems to have undone Rob Paul ban, and explained it as a mistake. Given that Ron Paul lamented he had received no warning about violations of the community standards before the ban, it seems likely it wasn't a deliberated and approved move, since they haven't acted this way before and if they wanted to start a fight for power with politicians they'd start with cases where their decision for the ban is as defensible as possible. 

Shooting the moderated figures would turn everyone against the social medias and they'd lose the power struggle fast. My most likely guess for what happened is an employee taking a shot against a figure he personally hated, and given the risk of backlash I'd expect Facebook to put in place a system against the risk of this happening again.

If you can quote me the other figures like Rob Paul and there are no explanations, or too many "accidental ban" explanations, then there would be more reasons to worry, I guess.

I 100% agree that I'd rather see this sites err on the side of caution than on the site of ban, and that such weird "mistakes" can be made is rather worrying. 

Refuting the validity of an election, starting before it happens, in a total lack of proofs, while you are the losing party of this election... eh. I'd hardly see it as a purely epistemological question. 

However, Twitter blocked the statements made by Trump as part of their "fact checking" policy, and banned his profile on a totally different motivation, how he addressed the rioters in supportive ways and the hints of doing it again in the future. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html

I can't really see social medias wanting to risk a fight this harsh with politicians for reasons like factual accuracy (Which worries me as a theme, but the alternative is leaving a giant fascism-shaped door wide open for taking our society.) also because every time they ban someone popular their profits go down. 

All in all, I'm believing the stated reasons and I see no evidence they'd have banned him anyway if he just disputed the election results in a more... let's say peaceful way. (Which is still attempting to subvert the government and a horrible thing to do).

I'd also say that the traditional information medias have long taken on themselves the power to interpret, comment, and refute news. What Twitter did calling Trump on such fake statements is hardly an unprecedented move. Any journalist that wouldn't have done the same would be hardly doing his job, and we'd see society being a lot worse off if they didn't. 

I know social medias aren't journalists, but if they provide information channels to the masses, there has to be a way to prevent powerful people from just systematically lying about everything with no contradictions. You get dictatorship a lot faster this way, it's basically how it gets on power every time (this isn't a claim that Trump is a fascist, just that we'd get one soon eventually).

Here you go: four layers of intellectual conversation.

Would be good to have it as a tag/wiki page

All your points are correct, but they explain why censorship can be successful, which I don't doubt. My point was that it ends up not being for the greater good.