Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

"The biggest drawback of any hosted solution is lack of freedom, and the potential for censorship. Not just for controversial content, sometimes major platforms make mistakes. Scaled moderation is almost always heavily automated, robots are not excellent judges of context and character."

Even if content moderation were implemented perfectly, it would still miss a whole host of issues that are often portrayed as moderation problems but really are not. To address those non-speech issues, we need a new strategy: treat social media companies as potential polluters of the social fabric, and directly measure and mitigate the effects thei... See more