Moderate people, not code.

u/taurusnoises

By its very nature, moderation is a form of censorship. You, as a community, space, or platform are deciding who and what is unacceptable. In Substack’s case, for example, they don’t allow pornography but they do allow Nazis. That’s not “free speech” but rather a business decision. If you’re making moderation based on financials, fine, but say so. Then platform users can make choices appropriately.

content-moderation subsidiarity. Just asthe general principle of political subsidiarity holds that decisions should bemade at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions,15content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual in-stances that make up the overall network.

OpenAI also contracted out what’s known as ghost labor: gig workers, including some in Kenya (a former British Empire state, where people speak Empire English) who make $2 an hour to read and tag the worst stuff imaginable — pedophilia, bestiality, you name it — so it can be weeded out. The filtering leads to its own issues. If you remove content with words about sex, you lose content of in-groups talking with one another about those things.

“you’ll never be able to sanitize the Internet.”

“Zuck Got Me For,” a site created by a meme account administrator who goes by Ana, is a place where creators can upload nonsensical content that was banned by Instagram’s moderation algorithms.

“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.

But algorithmic content moderation systems are more pervasive on the modern Internet, and often end up silencing marginalized communities and important discussions.

LaMDA's safety features could also be limiting: Michelle Taransky found that "the software seemed very reluctant to generate people doing mean things". Models that generate toxic content are highly undesirable, but a literary world where no character is ever mean is unlikely to be interesting.

The hypothesis is that hate speech is met with other speech in a free marketplace of ideas.That hypothesis only functions if users are trapped in one conversational space. What happens instead is that users choose not to volunteer their time and labor to speak around or over those calling for their non-existence (or for the non-existence of their friends and loved ones) and go elsewhere... Taking their money and attention with them.As those promulgating the hate speech tend to be a much smaller group than those who leave, it is in the selfish interest of most forums to police that kind of signal jamming to maximize their possible user-base. Otherwise, you end up with a forum full mostly of those dabbling in hate speech, which is (a) not particularly advertiser friendly, (b) hostile to further growth, and (c) not something most people who get into this gig find themselves proud of.

The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

Some social media platforms struggle with even relatively simple tasks, such as detecting copies of terrorist videos that have already been removed. But their task becomes even harder when they are asked to quickly remove content that nobody has ever seen before. “The human brain is the most effective tool to identify toxic material,” said Roi Carthy, the chief marketing officer of L1ght, a content moderation AI company. Humans become especially useful when harmful content is delivered in new formats and contexts that AI may not identify. “There’s nobody that knows how to solve content moderation holistically, period,” Carthy said. “There’s no such thing.”

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

If the link is in a Proud Boys forum, would you not take any action against it, even if it’s like, “Click this link to help plan”?Are you asking if we have people out there clicking every link and checking if the forum comports with the ideological position that Signal agrees with?Yeah. I think in the most abstract way, I’m asking if you have a content moderation team.No, we don’t have that. We are also not a social media platform. We don’t amplify content. We don’t have Telegram channels where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands of people. We have been really careful in our product development side not to develop Signal as a social network that has algorithmic amplification that allows that “one to millions” amplification of content. We are a messaging platform. We don’t have a content moderation team because (1) we are fully private, we don’t see your content, we don’t know who you’re talking about; and (2) we are not a content platform, so it is a different paradigm.

The Seattle Times turns off comments on “stories that are of a sensitive nature,” said Michelle Matassa Flores, executive editor of The Seattle Times. “People can’t behave on any story that has to do with race.” Comments are turned off on stories about race, immigration, and crime, for instance.

Take control of it for yourself.

Q: So, this means you don’t value hearing from readers?A: Not at all. We engage with readers every day, and we are constantly looking for ways to hear and share the diversity of voices across New Jersey. We have built strong communities on social platforms, and readers inform our journalism daily through letters to the editor. We encourage readers to reach out to us, and our contact information is available on this How To Reach Us page.

Many news organizations have made the decision to eliminate or restrict comments in recent years, from National Public Radio, to The Atlantic, to NJ.com, which did a nice job of explaining the decision when comments were removed from its site.

Experience has shown that anything short of 24-hour vigilance on all stories is insufficient.

Meanwhile, the algorithms that recommend this content still work to maximize engagement. This means every toxic post that escapes the content-moderation filters will continue to be pushed higher up the news feed and promoted to reach a larger audience.

In his New York Times profile, Schroepfer named these limitations of the company’s content-moderation strategy. “Every time Mr. Schroepfer and his more than 150 engineering specialists create A.I. solutions that flag and squelch noxious material, new and dubious posts that the A.I. systems have never seen before pop up—and are thus not caught,” wrote the Times. “It’s never going to go to zero,” Schroepfer told the publication.

Lori Morimoto, a fandom academic who was involved in the earlier discussion, didn’t mince words about the inherent hypocrisy of the controversy around STWW. “The discussions of the fic were absolutely riddled with people saying they wished you could block and/or ban certain users and fics on AO3 altogether because this is obnoxious,” she wrote to me in an email, “and nowhere (that I can see) is there anyone chiming in to say, ‘BUT FREE SPEECH!!!’” Morimoto continued: But when people suggest the same thing based on racist works and users, suddenly everything is about freedom of speech and how banning is bad. When it’s about racism, every apologist under the sun puts in an appearance to fight for our rights to be racist assholes, but if it’s about making the reading experience less enjoyable (which is basically what this is — it’s obnoxious, but not particularly harmful except to other works’ ability to be seen), then suddenly our overwhelming concern with free speech seems to just disappear in a poof of nothingness.

The solution, he said, was to identify “super-spreaders” of slander, the people and the websites that wage the most vicious false attacks.

Group Rules from the Admins1NO POSTING LINKS INSIDE OF POST - FOR ANY REASONWe've seen way too many groups become a glorified classified ad & members don't like that. We don't want the quality of our group negatively impacted because of endless links everywhere. NO LINKS2NO POST FROM FAN PAGES / ARTICLES / VIDEO LINKSOur mission is to cultivate the highest quality content inside the group. If we allowed videos, fan page shares, & outside websites, our group would turn into spam fest. Original written content only3NO SELF PROMOTION, RECRUITING, OR DM SPAMMINGMembers love our group because it's SAFE. We are very strict on banning members who blatantly self promote their product or services in the group OR secretly private message members to recruit them.4NO POSTING OR UPLOADING VIDEOS OF ANY KINDTo protect the quality of our group & prevent members from being solicited products & services - we don't allow any videos because we can't monitor what's being said word for word. Written post only.

Sarah Roberts’s new book Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (2019)

What were the “right things” to serve the community, as Zuckerberg put it, when the community had grown to more than 3 billion people?

"I am really pleased to see different sites deciding not to privilege aggressors' speech over their targets'," Phillips said. "That tends to be the default position in so many online 'free speech' debates which suggest that if you restrict aggressors' speech, you're doing a disservice to America—a position that doesn't take into account the fact that antagonistic speech infringes on the speech of those who are silenced by that kind of abuse."