FD #69: Moderation-Free Free Speech

Howdy from beehiiv, the newsletter & subscription platform with 100% less Nazis and anti-trans dipshits! If I did the configuring right, this should be arriving in the same inbox/state that the substack email did. Paid subscriptions aren’t configured yet, so everyone’s eating free at the moment. When I do configure them, price of the package going down, to $6 a month or $60 a year.

Even though the service isn’t free like Substack, they also don’t take 20% out of your pocket. If you’ve paid for an annual already, you’ll be getting 3 free months for your trouble, and VIP/Party Members have owed/additional goodies to look forward to now that some IP stuff has been sorted. Thank you to everyone who hung tough, had faith, and gently reminded me this was worth doing. There will be depressing posts in the future, but for now, some levity at the expense of DJT’s policy papers. Something to be thankful for, going into the holiday week.

To celebrate America electing a second Muppet as president to non-consecutive terms, @Black Aziz Anansi posted his Free Speech Policy Initiative, which I kicked back to peruse while eating a Quesadilla from this banging Mexican place.

It’s even worse than I imagined. Not in a dire Handmaid’s Tale way, in a Benny Hill x 4chan x Teletubbies kind of way. In our post-Citizens United world, lawful speech is equivalent to spending/campaign finance, and the language used here reflects that. If anything approximating this policy initiative is enshrined into law, the internet & campaign spending both will be fundamentally, irrevocably and hilariously changed.

This is amazing for several reasons, most importantly being “categorize” in that first bit. All news, media, social networks, or entertainment engages in categorizing of lawful speech. Advertising is bought, by the millions of impressions, by brands and companies who explicitly demand the ability to show ads to only certain Americans. If you don’t allow companies to do that, they will not engage in “free speech” Musk and Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino learned this the hard way. This could extend to anyone at the Federal-gov’t level who has ever bought an ad on X/Meta/LinkedIn, across every federal bureaucracy. Did you post a job on LinkedIn and used funds to micro-target the job to a specific industry or two? Fired.

Wait wait wait, you’re telling me you’re going to demand Meta, Google, and ByteDance to not delete all of the ads and evidence of electioneering that Musk and various shady PACs engaged in? Absolutely send those letters. To both campaigns and every tech company from Facebook to TruthSocial. Evidentiary discovery will be more exciting than the Tyson Paul Interpretive Dance. Also, to go toe-to-toe with Big Tech, the DoJ would need to grow in size so intensely, it would trip all the alerts Muskaswamy will build preventing spikes in Federal hiring. So, strong work all around.

Y’all need to stop teasing me with a good time. If passed, removing Section 230 neutrality for social networks will cause the largest reduction in tech stock share value since 2001. The mandate to spend more while losing powers is amazing, as Zuck and the 7 Dwarf social media platforms will bend over backwards to satisfy an impossible request. This, in and of itself is value neutral, but Big Tech will spend billions on this instead of other evil things, so I’ll stamp it a win.

Last and strongest:

It’s hard to make out, so the two critical bits are:

• Gov’t officials should need a COURT ORDER to get content taken down, instead of only needing an official request from a gov’t office.

• All users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of all content moderation and curation on any feed/platform of their choosing.

The court order thing is incredible, in its own right, given the speed that the courts actually run at. Additionally, if this is required for all content, foreign & domestic, I am eager to see how international governments will be required to get court orders from a domestic court in order to get a Twitter post taken down.

But that last bit, that’s an entirely different kettle of enchiladas. All social networks besides Bluesky use content moderation, curation, and algorithmic feed shaping. It’s how they make money, through placing ads on that feed. Allowing anyone over the age of 18 to flip a switch to remove all moderation & curation will only obliterate the revenue of any social media network that implements it. But more insanely, it will also turn every social network into something approximating 4chan’s /b/ or the SomethingAwful forums. Most people have no idea how much disgusting, violent, or horrific content gets posted, as it is taken down or blocked at scale. If this goes through, every American will have a firehose of poo at their disposal, able to access shitstreams of unfathomable horror with no hope of containing it.

Best things I’ve read since the election, adjacent without being post-mortems or boiled over analysis.

against the dark forest (wrecka.ge) A truly excellent retort to the “Internet is becoming a Dark Forest” thesis that I’ve bandied about.

“But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.”

Inflation and the Hyperreal Election (Mike Caulfield) A great reminder that Democrats can’t sell their accomplishments because they always focus on the macro. While everyone living in the micro ignores them and pays attention to the micro-targeted ads the GOP is hitting them with.

Tyson/Paul Was a Boxing Match That Felt Like Netflix (Defector) David Roth says what we all thought about the match better than anyone could:

“This difference was easy to find on Friday night's card. The undercard fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano and the main event between Tyson and Paul were the same sport played by the same rules, but were also instantly identifiable as very different things. This isn't just a matter of superior ingredients leading to a superior product, although there is that. It is not even the difference between a bout in which two fighters are trying and one in which both are just sort of trying to put the other over. It's hard to name it, and earnestness doesn't quite capture it. One feels like sports; the other feels like content.”

Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe (Hamilton Nolan) Mr. Nolan shows that even if Musk’s motivations were as-or-more noble than Steve “Captain America” Rogers, his dragon hoard of wealth is a corrupting influence on democracy by even existing. Billionaires probably shouldn’t exist, or at least should be required to justify their existence through what Corporate Charters used to be.

SCAM AMERICA 777 (Never Hungover) We live in the age of scams, with Trump’s core demographics being both those most preyed on and most likely to prey on others at the same time. It’s multi-level marketing all the way down.

An Open Letter to the Incoming Trump Administration About Psychedelics (Trip Report)

There will be hard times ahead, but there will also be good times. Know that. Be thankful for what you’ve worked all year to earn. Know that you deserve it. There will be more deep dives, paywall-free links, and this year’s Best in Show before we hibernate for the holidays.

Keep it warm, the times they are a’changing,
tn