Internet Governance

In terms of educating the human/internet hivemind (if you will), if we allow controversial accounts and sites to exist (never banning anyone’s accounts) we allow freedom of thought and moderators can aggregate controversial views in single locations. However, so as to not degrade the overall mental health and societal discourse, users should be allowed to block thoroughly, as in blocking an account and all other tangential accounts (followers, rebloggers, etc.) to whatever degree they desire. Furthermore, like all good governance, instead of outright banning, admins/moderators should be able to automatically nudge new and average users away from content and other users that are surrounded by controversy.

Accounts and content that is deemed controversial or extreme (qualified by a host of strong opinions for and/or against it) should be shoved down to the bottom of search results, and should be demonetized. Not just preventing owners from collecting ad monies on controversial content (discouraging continual production), but also preventing marketing entities from posting ads on it entirely so they don’t get the choice to associate their brands with it.

It’s really important that controversial opinions are allowed to be said. It’s important for people to feel heard, it’s important for society to occasionally hear things that are far from their traditions and default world views and values. But it’s also important that society (at least internet society) doesn’t constantly consume the information equivalent of tons of junk food all the time, every day.

In regards to publicly elected officials and their conduct online: this is a problem for government to solve, not the private sector. Private sector should never be allowed to silence publicly elected representatives, it is a bad precedent and puts privately owned companies over many more people who are being represented by an individual. However, this requires that the chair and office that the representative is holding polices itself so that poor conduct that is unbecoming of a state representative is simply disallowed for any sitting and maybe even formerly sitting representative, online or not, no matter how they express their poor conduct.