I spend a lot of time worrying about online radicalization, and while there's a lot that we still don't really understand about it, one thing that seems to be a pretty common thread is that people might pick up ideas on 'big spaces' (pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Substack) the real radicalization occurs in smaller spaces, like 4chan, incel forums, private chats, etc. I think some people believe that if they can totally remove anything that could radicalize from those big spaces, maybe fewer people will go to those small spaces.
I entirely get the logic and I used to agree with it. But I think we've tried that expirement (Facebook banning QAnon, Twitter banning everyone pro-J6) and saw that it just made those actually radical spaces, like Gab, bigger and angrier.
Meanwhile, we're starting to appreciate the benefit of cross-cutting spaces. If something like Substack can radicalize, logic follows it can also deradicalize. So if Substack offers extremist publications, it offers orders of magnitude more publications on socialist politics, moderate conservatism, knitting, etc. And I think it's fair to say that it's recommendation algorithm is far more tilted towards positive than negative.
If I quit everything that took my money and hosted truly bad people, I wouldn't be able to use Cloudflare, WordPress, my web-hosting domain, Google, Protonmail, and a vast array of other services. Substack, at least as I see it right now, is at least offering a healthy and competitive information environment. Quitting that, I think, would make it worse.
(Sorry for the long-winded answers! Maybe I should have written something specifically about this affair)
Thanks! And I absolutely take your points, here. I've made some of my concerns known to Substack privately, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they're keen to find some alternative ways to deal with this problem.
Absolutely. But that's also my point: I don't believe that Substack is, say, recommending BE&S readers Nazi newsletters. I do *think* that it's probably recommending knitting blogs to readers of Nazi newsletters. If that changes тАФ and Substack's algorithm starts rewarding extremist content тАФ then I'll definitely reconsider this position.
I spend a lot of time worrying about online radicalization, and while there's a lot that we still don't really understand about it, one thing that seems to be a pretty common thread is that people might pick up ideas on 'big spaces' (pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Substack) the real radicalization occurs in smaller spaces, like 4chan, incel forums, private chats, etc. I think some people believe that if they can totally remove anything that could radicalize from those big spaces, maybe fewer people will go to those small spaces.
I entirely get the logic and I used to agree with it. But I think we've tried that expirement (Facebook banning QAnon, Twitter banning everyone pro-J6) and saw that it just made those actually radical spaces, like Gab, bigger and angrier.
Meanwhile, we're starting to appreciate the benefit of cross-cutting spaces. If something like Substack can radicalize, logic follows it can also deradicalize. So if Substack offers extremist publications, it offers orders of magnitude more publications on socialist politics, moderate conservatism, knitting, etc. And I think it's fair to say that it's recommendation algorithm is far more tilted towards positive than negative.
If I quit everything that took my money and hosted truly bad people, I wouldn't be able to use Cloudflare, WordPress, my web-hosting domain, Google, Protonmail, and a vast array of other services. Substack, at least as I see it right now, is at least offering a healthy and competitive information environment. Quitting that, I think, would make it worse.
(Sorry for the long-winded answers! Maybe I should have written something specifically about this affair)
Thanks! And I absolutely take your points, here. I've made some of my concerns known to Substack privately, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they're keen to find some alternative ways to deal with this problem.
Absolutely. But that's also my point: I don't believe that Substack is, say, recommending BE&S readers Nazi newsletters. I do *think* that it's probably recommending knitting blogs to readers of Nazi newsletters. If that changes тАФ and Substack's algorithm starts rewarding extremist content тАФ then I'll definitely reconsider this position.