Why is it Okay to Block Spam but Not Abuse?

I cannot find this now, as Google is a disaster wrapped in a dumpster fire wrapped in a cesspool, but a few days ago I saw a paper that suggested that treating abuse and hate as we treat spam would be good. It would be. But it will never happen, because the people in charge of the social media platforms benefit from abuse and hate.

I, as you likely do, have a junk or Spam folder in my email client. It is stuffed everyday with material that my email provider believes might be Spam — emails that I did not ask for, that could be harmful, or are just ads. There is nothing in that folder that I marked as Spam. I could, and I know that people do, but generally speaking, the system does a good job of finding the right material with very few false positive and negatives. It has made the use of email so much more pleasant than before the invention of Spam filters. It could do the same for social media.

We could invent abuse/hate filters, if the companies in charge really wanted to. The process would be very much the same: machine learning around key words and terms, identifying purveyors and treating them with more caution, etc. It would not be perfect — nothing created by the crooked timber of humankind ever is — but it would create a much more pleasant, less antagonistic social media. And the owners of social media will never do it.

They want your engagement, and it is well known that items that produce anger and outrage increase engagement. They are not good for you, but they are good for the bottom line. This engagement mining also leads to disingenuous comments about free speech.

They cannot possibly filter our abuse and hate, they say, because that would limit free speech. This is a nonsense argument. Technically, all these platforms have rules against certain content. Twitter has purged leftist accounts, and Meta has favored conservative voices. Even the better platforms, like Bluesky, try to avoid this fight by putting the onus on others to protect themselves through the use of their admittedly excellent moderation and blocking tools. Bluesky could do a spam-like abuse filter, but they choose not to, in part because they see hate speech as freer than other kinds of speech as well. Free speech is obviously in the eye of the beholder, and the owners of these platforms behold commercial and other spam material to be be free speech while conservative outrage is.

I suspect that this is because the leaders of these firms align with the hate and the abuse. Elon Musk has explicitly aligned with neo-Nazis, letting several back on Twitter and has pushed his Twitter based imitative AI product to be “anti-woke” resulting in it going full fascist, including calling itself mecha-Hitler. But Meta is just as bad. Zuckerberg refused, against the advice of his team, to limit hate speech because that would limit conservative reach. After the election, he made it explicit that they would allow more hate speech on their platforms. Both of them have given money to Trump’s inaugural, Musk worked to illegally destroy government agencies for Trump. They have clearly and obviously aligned themselves with the MAGA movement, and their choice to continue to allow abuse and hate on the platforms is just more evidence of their intentions.

We could live in a world where social media is like email — useful, pleasant, and generally a part of our lives that causes little to no stress. But the rulers of our social media platforms refuse to build that world. If we want a less toxic internet, we are going to have to regulate these firms to get it. Because right now, an ad for a birth control pill is not speech, but calling someone insane for being gay is.