I hate censorship: here's how we should do censorship on Hive

Rule 1: There should be no censorship on Hive. Rule 2: Here's how we should allow censorship on Hive. Rule 3: The capacity to deal with paradox is a defining feature of Humanity.

Censorship is Content Moderation

I'm listening to a new podcast called "Moderated Content" featuring evelyn douek Assistant Professor at Stanford Law talking to Daphne Keller. They're talking about the new Texas Law which tries to protect free speech on large platforms. I got there from Casey Newton's substack which is also where this high level explanation of the Texas HB20 Law comes from:

I’ve written a few times here about HB20, which allows the state’s attorney general and average citizens to sue platforms with more than 50 million users any time they believe the platform removed a post due to the viewpoint it expresses. In May, the US Supreme Court temporarily blocked the law from taking effect while it was appealed. But just over a week ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling and allowed the law to take effect. The case is now almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court.

I read and listen to content about these subjects from people I vehemently disagree with. I do this so you probably don't have to.

But one idea dropped out which I think we could bring to Hive in a strange way.

Let's do censorship on Hive

Also from Casey's Substack quoting Keller on the podcast:

On the show, Keller wonders whether platforms might be able to get around the most vexing parts of the Texas law by allowing users to opt in to content moderation: showing them all the abuse and hate speech and everything else by default, but letting them click a button that restores the community guidelines and the regular platform experience.

“The middle ground I'm most interested in … is to flood Texas with garbage by default, but give users an opt out to go back to the moderated experience,” Keller said. “And there's some language in the statute that kind of, sort of, arguably makes that okay. And it sort of illustrates the problem with the Texas law by flooding everyone with garbage by default, while avoiding a bunch of the bad consequences of actually flooding everybody with garbage permanently.”

Audio clip of that on Fountain

Here's my idea for Hive: Opt In Censorship

We provide a tool or tools at the base protocol level for anyone to set themselves up as a "Content Moderator" or "Trust and Safety" authority on Hive. Or they can pick which ever euphemism for Censor they feel comfortable with (I guess it's like choosing your own pronouns).

Hive then allows any one of us to SUBSCRIBE to and have our view of Hive filtered by any or all of these authorities on what we should or shouldn't see.

What does this fix

Right now Hive is largely invisible. Whether this is through malicious suppression or our lack of millions of dollars of marketing budget or some combination of both, it is a fact.

If Hive ever grew to be large enough or gained notoriety, at some point regulators, censors and other ne'er-do-wells would crawl out of the woodwork all over the world and DEMAND that "Hive" install a trust and safety policy or some such. Most of Hive's front ends do actually have some policies in place over absolutely illegal content but we don't have active censorship.

Yes, I know about the back and forth of downvote wars, and whilst deciding who gets REWARDED for content is still an issue, these don't per-se make it impossible to view downvoted content.

Hive's collective answer to anyone coming and demanding we install content moderation will be: do it yourself.

You be the censor you want Hive to have

The censor will need an account, to invest time, talent and treasure in the required HP to make the account have some level of authority and then start policing Hive for content the censor doesn't want others to see.

The censor will have access to the full back end database of Hive, because we all do. The censor can build their own filter systems and or whatever AI or machine learning (or skip logic in COBOL) they wish. This shouldn't be part of Hive's core.

The censor will also need to convince Hive's users, one by one, they should opt in to a world in which that censor controls their view of Hive.

This sounds ridiculous, who would use this?

Honestly, this is more of a thought experiment than a call to the core devs to stop doing useful stuff and build this. But I want it to be regarded as possible. If in some far off future we are attacked in this way, this should be our answer: heck if a regulator wants this future so badly, they can contribute to the DHF or pay someone directly to modify the core code and put in the pull requests.

If you want to censor Hive: here are the tools; do it yourself and let each member of the community vote whether to accept your censorship or not.