The Invisible Labor of Content Moderation

The digital sphere is artificially built and those who operate it get to set its rules in ways that are enforced in code, which is to say that are enforced as the laws of the system itself. That is how structural power is established. Many parts of the digital landscape are presented on the surface as consumer goods (social, search) or as markets (... See more

Platforms are increasingly governing participants’ opportunities and livelihoods, and with that comes the need for mutual accountability and evolving protections and responsibilities.

Naturally, social media companies will not want to give up this control. But sometimes there are technological forces that are more powerful than even the biggest companies. To me, it seems clear that an LLM-based filtering system will be a naturally democratizing force. It will naturally nudge the world towards putting more control in the hands of... See more

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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How to moderate live audio is still an open question. Facebook is getting better at moderating text and video content, particularly in the United States. But as a recent series in the Guardian has illustrated, policy enforcement tends to grow weaker the further removed the content is from Menlo Park.

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