Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant | JRE Twitter Special

So there's a point to be made if you, I understand you want a healthy, like you want Twitter to grow, you need it to grow, the shareholders need it to grow, the advertisers need to advertise, so you've got all these restrictions. But allowing people to say these awful things makes sure we stay away from them. And it allows us to avoid certain people. And isn't it important to know that these people hold these beliefs? If you get rid of them, you know, someone could walk into a business and you wouldn't even know that they were a neo Nazi. But if they were high profile saying their things, you'd be like, that's the guy at home. You're absolutely right. This is like one of my favorite sayings is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And it's so, so, so true. Like one of the biggest problems with censorship is the fact that you push people underground and you don't know what's going on. And this is something I worry about. It's not that I don't worry about it. You ban people for these rules. Because I also worry about driving people away from the platform and affecting their real lives. So like, we're trying to find this right balance. And I hear you like, you may not think we're drawing the low lines in the right place. And we get that feedback all the time. And we're always trying to find the right places to do this. But I worry as much about like the underground and like being able to shine a light on these things as anything else. Tim, I think it's a cost benefit analysis and we have to constantly rehash it and do it. Like we, we have the technology we have today. And we are looking at technologies which open up the aperture even more. And we all agree that a binary on or off is not the right answer and is not scalable. We have started getting into nuance within our enforcement. And we've also started getting into nuance with the presentation of content. So, you know, one path might have been for some of your replies for us to just remove those offensive replies completely. We don't do that. We hide it behind an interstitial to protect the original Twitter and also folks who don't want to see that. They can still see everything. They just have to do one more tap. So that's one solution. Ranking is another solution. But as technology gets better and we get better at applying to it, we have a lot more optionality. Whereas we don't, we don't have that as much today. I feel like, you know, I'm just going to reiterate an earlier point, though, you know, if you recognize sunlight is the best disinfectant, you're it's like you're chasing after a goal that can never be met. If you want to, if you want to protect all speech and they start banning certain individual, you want to, you want to increase the amount of healthy conversations. But you're banning some people. Well, how long until this group is now offended by that group? How long until you've banned everybody? I hear you. I don't believe a permanent ban promotes health. I don't believe that. But we have to we have to work with the technologies, tools and conditions that we that we have today. So and evolve over over time to where we can see examples, like this woman at the Westboro Baptist Church, who was using Twitter every single day to spread hate against the LGBTQA community. And over time, we had, I think it was three or four folks on Twitter who would engage her every single day about what she was doing. And she actually left the church. That's Megan Phelps. She's amazing. And she's crazy. She's now pulling her family out of that as well. And you could make the argument that if we banned that account early on, she would have never left the church. I completely hear that we we get it. It's just. Well, so I just want to make sure we're advancing the conversation too, and not just going to go back. So I'll just ask you this. Have you considered allowing some of these people permanently banned back on with some restrictions? Maybe you can only tweet twice per day. Maybe you can't retweet or something to that effect. I think we're very early in our thinking here. So we're open minded to how to do this. I think we agree philosophically that permanent bans are an extreme case scenario, and it shouldn't be one of our regularly used tools in our tool chest. So how we do that, I think, is something that we're actively talking about today. Is there a timeline that we can? So look, you know, a lot of that would fix a lot of problems. You think so? Yes, I really do. I'm just curious, like, are you thinking like bands of a year or five years, 10 years? Like, I'm just curious, like, what is what is a reasonable ban in this kind of context? Well, I think reasonably someone should have to state their case as to why they want to be unbanned. Like someone should have to have a like a well measured, considerate response to what they did wrong. Do they agree with what they did wrong? Maybe perhaps saying why they don't think they did anything wrong. And you could review it from there. I think, you know, one of the challenges is we have the benefit in English common law of hundreds of years of precedent and developing new rules and figuring out what works and doesn't. Twitter is very different. So I think with the technology, I don't know if you need permanent bands or even or even suspensions at all, you could literally just, I mean, lock someone's account is essentially suspending them. But again, I wouldn't, you know, claim to know anything about the things you go through. But what if you just restricted most of what they could say, you know, you blocked certain words in a certain dictionary, if someone's been, you know, if someone was such a greased hill. Oh, but no, but but but think about this way. Is it better that the permanently banned or better, but it's not it's not good. No, no, no. Think about this way. Instead of being suspended for 72 hours, you get a dictionary block from paid speech words. Right. Does that not make sense? People just use coded language. This is what we see all the time. Yeah, I don't think that's a good move. What do you think?