Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. The thing that people bring up is, oh, you wrote this note and whatever it was, 2014, to the team that gets overplayed. As early as 2010, I was like this is nonsense, why are we allowing this stuff on the platform? The defense there was a combination of both the naivety around where the free speech wing and the free speech party. There was also this sort of like, well, because it's a slippery slope. If you suspend Bob, then what are you going to do the next time Janet says something like that? Or, if you're going to suspend Bob for X, what are you going to do about when Janet says X prime? I just kind of said, well, who cares? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. This guy's clearly threatening violence against this person, but in a way that doesn't specifically violate our terms of service, which is stupid because our terms of service say, “In addition to all the specific reasons you can be kicked off.” The terms of service say, “We can remove your account for any reason or no reason.” Just tell him we removed you for no reason. Yeah, you're auser. I just always wished we were more aggressive on that front while understanding the other side of the coin. The heavy pushback I got, which was, if we do X then what about X prime? I just think that all of the platforms have waited too long to say, well, actually we do need to go do X and we'll figure out X prime when it happens. I think pundits talk about this a lot where they're like, well, in order to maintain their status as agnostic platform, that's not taking sides and actually being a media company, if they arbit what is said on their platform too much, then they'll be viewed as an arbiter instead of an independent. I think this wades into Section 230 territory. Fair enough. However, the problem is the companies already arbit what you can do on the platform. If you post a video of beating your dog, guess what? It gets taken down. Why? Because the company decides that people didn’t need to see that garbage. You're already editing and moderating what happens on the platform. To say, oh, no, we're the phone company. No, you're not. We take stuff down every day. I just have always found that to be a sort of a fourth down time to pun, not the right way to think about it.…

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