Social Platform Trust & Safety

Facebook Groups also allow moderators to remain anonymous, despite the platform otherwise requiring “real names.” While anonymity is not a panacea for harassment—many harassers in our study used their real names—it makes it possible for public figures to evade responsibility for engaging in hate or harassment.

Centralised moderation isn't the only option that doesn't work. We also need to eliminate any option that doesn't have a credible mean of doing the work — and it's a lot of work, meaning that either someone needs to get paid or you need a lot of volunteers. And punting it to the users can never work.

But if this ideal of freedom may be absolute within its domain, this is possible only because the domain is narrow, tightly limited by rigorous conditions for entering it.

A social media app that aims to be town square is different to a social networking app that aims to provide a smaller, safe community. The latter has a far easier time banning accounts from entities like ICE, because it can set a tighter set of community rules. So one lesson is perhaps that we need — or at least, many people need — a pluralistic... See more

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 .