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

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more

This is what happens in an online ecosystem where the boundaries between communities are gone, and moderators (by nature of the platform's universality) cannot exist.

I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have

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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. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incenti... See more

You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles (which at any rate means absolutely nothing without accountability to people). There is simply no universal ranking of content acceptability — there are in fact likely as many different rankings as there are people — and even if there were there ... See more