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

There is the argument (that I regularly advocate) that pushing out the moderation to the ends of the network (i.e., giving more controls to the end users) is better, but that also has some complications in that it puts the burden on end users, and they have neither the time nor inclination to continually tweak their own settings. No matter wh

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moderation is, inherently, a subjective practice. Despite some people’s desire to have content moderation be more scientific and objective, that’s impossible. By definition, content moderation is always going to rely on judgment calls, and many of the judgment calls will end up in gray areas where lots of people’s opinions may differ greatly.

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First, the most obvious one: any moderation is likely to end up pissing off those who are moderated. After all, they posted their content in the first place, and thus thought it belonged wherever it was posted — so will almost certainly disagree with the decision to moderate it. Now, some might argue the obvious response to this is to do no m

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Content moderation at scale  is impossible to do well . Importantly, this is  not  an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do  better jobs  within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including ma

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