He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this model when the outcomes appear politicized.
I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong.
And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes.
Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.
I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong.
And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes.
Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.