Social Platform Trust & Safety

These are the sorts of ways in which speech moderation online must embrace the political. The main question we must be asking about a speech platform is not what are the standards for moderation but who moderates and what is the moderator’s relationship to the community .

For example, you can send anonymous messages. You can anonymously DM somebody and you can send an anonymous message in a group. This is a format that has historically been really fun and people really like, but it inevitably falls apart because somebody gets bullied and kills themselves. For Daze, you'll be able to send anonymous messages, but... See more

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.

For Tech Companies

Close anonymity loopholes . Facebook Groups and Pages can be created without linking to a specific Facebook user; only an email address is necessary. Admins can post to their groups under the Group or Page name, effectively allowing anonymous, or at least, pseudonymous, posts. Ending anonymity will not end harassment; in some... See more

Open signups are a business decision. There are many ways that a platform could make it harder to get an account. Lots of real-world privileges have more steps – government IDs like passports or drivers licenses, obviously, but also financial transactions like bank accounts, car loans, or mortgages; or joining high-status organizations like social... See more