Microblog @ the Duck of Minerva

(Social) Network Patrimonialism

by Dan Nexon | 14 December 2022, 1607 EST | | 0 Comments

Moderating a Reddit channel is hard. Moderating a massive, social, user-generated content site like Twitter? Sisyphus would take one look and go back to his boulder.

This assumes you approach moderation with a legal-rational mindset — one that aims for — and is judged by its ability to deliver — a fair and consistent application of publicly legible rules concerning, on the one hand, acceptable behavior and, on the other hand, the penalties for transgressing those rules.

This was the old approach at Twitter. It failed a lot of the time. On a site as massive as Twitter, even a near-perfect record of content moderation will produce, in absolute terms, a substantial number of mistakes. Since “content moderation” is another way of saying “enforcing community standards” or “mandating values,” “bias” isn’t a matter of ideological tilt, but of equal application of the rules. When it comes to balancing freedom of expression against “trust and safety” on Twitter, true success on legal-rational terms is impossible. It’s about doing “better” rather than “worse.”

So what about Elon Musk? He’s managed to cut Twitter’s own Gordian Knot. Rather than try to make impartial moderation work, he has simply dispensed with legal-rational principles altogether. Twitter is Musk’s personal patrimony, and that’s exactly how he’s treating it.

There’s nothing that the U.S. right loves more than watching ‘great men’ wield patrimonial authority — provided it’s used by one of their own.

Pos(t)essive Individualism

by Dan Nexon | 14 December 2022, 0026 EST | | 0 Comments

Adam Serwer doesn’t break new ground when he argues that “The consistency here lies in the belief that corporations and people have freedom of speech as long as they exercise that right on behalf of right-wing causes.” But he does provide the receipts.

I think that’s only part of the story.

For the last few weeks I’ve been ruminating on a series of fragmentary ideas and questions. These include:

  • The marketplace of ideas is at best a mediocre metaphor. The public sphere does not work like a market; free expression does not lead the “best” (whatever the hell that means) ideas to prevail. There are plenty of reasons to treat freedom of expression as a fundamental right. The claim that it causes better ideas to prevail over weaker ones isn’t among them.
  • Has the right-wing fixation on the second amendment — which is ultimately a right to purchase and own a consumer product — redefined (or solidified) an attitude toward freedom (“possessive individualism“) that C. B. Macpherson erroneously attributed to John Locke?
  • The fight between supporters of liberal democracy and reactionary populism is also (perhaps just as much) about the place of republicanism in the American project. Ironically, it’s the “republic, not a democracy” crowd that’s more likely to reject republican conceptions of political community.

I still don’t quite understand precisely how these, and other parts of my mental word cloud, come together.

Welcome to the Microblog

by Dan Nexon | 13 December 2022, 2308 EST | | 2 Comments

Since its founding in 2005, the Duck of Minerva has been home to many experiments.

Some failed, and were abandoned. Some succeeded, and were abandoned.

Given current uncertainties (and, let’s face it, “ick factor”) about Twitter, I thought it might be interesting to shift microblogging to… a blog.

We’ll see how this works. Or doesn’t.

About

The microblog contains short, informal posts. These are the kinds of scribbles one might expect to find on Twitter or Mastodon, except here they reside at an actual weblog.