The Invisible Labor of Content Moderation

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

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings ... See more

As communities grow, so too does their need for moderation to ensure that content does not become toxic. In communities where moderation is vital, like group therapy, these solutions can augment human moderators and allow services and platforms to scale. AI-based moderation is rarely cost-effective for a platform to build in-house.