Some genres of adversarial action are “You are in de facto competion with others covering the same beat for distribution by the platform and they may allege TOS violations to decrease competition for their content” and “People may intentionally misconstrue you into a violation.”
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Should either of these happen you’re at the mercy of how customer service groups are budged for and incentived, which means there exists a material chance that you’ll get shut down and then have your tickets routed into the /dev/null queue.
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Note that while one is at substantially more risk of this if operating in a domain where folks have already operationalized pressure campaigns (e.g. partisan politics) the Cardinal Richileu effect means that a sufficiently dedicated adversary can probably find something anywhere.
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(Explaining that reference for the benefit of readers in countries where this isn’t on standard curriculum: Cardinal Richileu, a historical figure, is purported to have said “Give me six lines written by any man and I will find something justifying having him hanged.”)
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I think there was some deep wisdom in classical liberalism saying “You know maybe if we take the government broadly out of the business of regulating speech we won’t incentivize folks to use us as a weapon in petty disputes.” and, unfortunately, this seems out of favor.
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People claim that platforms aren’t government, which is true, but at sufficient scale they start to look a lot like one in terms of juicy value for hitting a target, and they’re very obviously being weaponized for this purpose.
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And I suppose the folks doing that think they are either the only people smart enough to rules lawyer or they are sufficiently insulated by social power at the platform and always will be. These seem like very poor bets to make over long time scales, and negative sum.
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This argument seems naive regarding pre-internet platforms. They were also subject to adversarial action and depended on the skill of their lawyers and the size of their war chest.
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I think it’s a question of degree. Consider publishers as a platform: do you have any books around your house which say “Does this book violate our policies? Do you want it pulled from shelves? Write to our Enforcement Division at 123 Main St...”
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Here’s my Medium farewell. Tidbit: I don’t want analytics.https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed-Skinner-Box.html …
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