This is, you might say, not just an important problem in society, but the only problem in society.
"Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone.
And so on, and so forth. That is not a justification for any one thing like this, but the general principle is that when the bad actors make things toxic enough for the mainstream users, somebody has to step in, or a social platform quickly degrades until it becomes 4Chan, or Gab, or whatever.
> "Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone.
This is an atrocious analogy. The reason we require licenses for motor vehicles is that they are very dangerous pieces of machinery that can easily do fatal damage to car occupants and pedestrians, as well as property damage. Likening such a domain with that of communication and speech (what we're discussing here) is ridiculous.
Think through this analogy a little more thoroughly. Freedom of speech is an important issue precisely because it’s dangerous. Speech can ignite revolutions against unjust tyrants, and speech can also mobilize hate and terrorism.
Speech is not without consequence to society. If it was not dangerous to the lives and property of others, it wouldn’t matter so much.
I think the argument that speech is less dangerous than the right to drive a car is naïve and uninformed by both history and what we see in plain sight.
I mean seriously, can you look at white supremacist terrorisms radicalized online and tell me that speech has no consequences?
Of course it has consequences. If speech didn’t have consequences, it wouldn’t be worth defending.
———
But even if you refuse to accept that speech is dangerous, you must accept that it has consequences, that it can affect the experience of other people.
If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a need to moderate speech on this very platform. Everyone could post anything they like. It would be more like... Maybe the right to park your car on a busy street during rush hour.
Nobody will slam into your car, but it will certainly affect their use of a common resource.
Unrestricted use of a common resource leads to a tragedy of the commons, and nobody ends up enjoying it except the vermin, who reduce each other’s enjoyment to the barest minimum.
There are two ways of dealing with the issue. You can default-deny, like only allowing people to drive after a test, or you can default-allow, like just like anything else.
We usually use default-deny only where the severity of bad behavior is very high. That's because it has a high cost for both most people and the test-issuers, and it has a very high cost to the few people caught as false positives. It is a very damaging mode for society. We are also migrating into only using default-deny on the internet, even on consequence-less contexts, and the previous paragraph still applies.
We may get a better world if we take some of the privacy away from the network level, we may even get to keep more of it overall.
"Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone.
And so on, and so forth. That is not a justification for any one thing like this, but the general principle is that when the bad actors make things toxic enough for the mainstream users, somebody has to step in, or a social platform quickly degrades until it becomes 4Chan, or Gab, or whatever.
Same reasoning behind moderation here on HN.