There's a lot of porn on twitter, and the fact that so many people use porn as an example of something that twitter has to ban, not knowing that twitter doesn't ban porn and it nonetheless isn't in their face all the time, perfectly illustrates that banning things from a platform such as twitter is not necessary, that people are perfectly able to avoid things that are not banned.
I'm in Vietnam and about six months ago I made a new Twitter account for our business.
I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff.
I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and coffee related accounts and the suggestions got better after a few days but not entirely. Then for reasons about a month ago I decided that our business shouldn't use Twitter anyway.
Incidentally when I log into my personal Facebook account here, since I have personalized ads turned off I get shown local Vietnamese language ads in the sidebar and for several months these have just been straight up hardcore porn. Loads of penis enlargement ads featuring close ups of actual penises, lots of "hot women in your area" showing way more than I want to see when I just logged in to check how my family back home in Europe are doing.
Just because you don't see unwanted stuff on social media, don't assume other people have the same experience. Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar), and we all know what's going on with Twitter. I'm pretty sure that within a pretty short timeframe it's no longer going to be borderline underage stuff in non English speaking parts of the world.
> Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar)
None of us know what kind of content moderation went on there. There is no public index of what gets removed, and according to Brandon Silverman, even Facebook itself does not review it:
> "violating content... in a lot of cases what happens is it gets removed, it gets taken down from the platform, and more often than not, essentially deleted, just disappears forever. A lot of that violating content is really important to the public interest, and it would be enormously valuable if we were able to create spaces for that content and the actors involved and the networks they create and build to be studied by an outside community, and an independent research ecosystem over time."
It's possible that whoever was removing content there was close to the military. We don't know. Other Asian countries could have similar influence. Isn't it accepted that Mark wants to bring Facebook to China? Maybe they wanted to see Facebook demonstrate its content controls before allowing them in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, I believe I said “porn is excluded or hidden from some contexts,” which is how Twitter handles it, at least within the U.S.
Anyway, the point is that moderation of porn is widely socially accepted because it aligns with values that are widely held. And if you want to understand why people want hate speech moderated (for example), you also need to look at it through the lens of values and beliefs that people hold.
Twitter does ban and restrict access for what it considers porn-like. In fact they seem to be relaxed on straight up hardcore pornography than marginal contents so to strengthen some sort of isolation.
