Social Platform Trust & Safety

exploring the bounds of social platforms’ responsibility to keep the spaces safe

town square that spans the entire globe. Our aim, then, is to show a way past this impasse. The two views ar

Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

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.

Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

For synthetic media to reach millions of views—as the Swift images did in just hours—they need massive, aggregated networks, which allow them to identify an initial audience and then spread. As the amount of available content grows with the broader use of generative AI, social media’s role as curator will become even more important.

Nathaniel Lubin • What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet

“The boundary between public and private is part of the conflict between public spheres. For example, until recently, only feminists though domestic violence was a public concern, rather than a private matter. Democratic publicity therefore requires positive guarantees of opportunities for minorities to convince others of what qualifies as common

Musubi - Moderation Supercharged

musubilabs.ai

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 .

Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

It is because a universal public square cannot be a community that the parameters of the online speech debate are stuck. The conflict between the “marketplace of ideas” framework and the “communal norms” framework seems irresolvable because it is irresolvable.

Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs

For example, in one experiment, Stroud found that when comment sections on news sites replaced the “like” button with a “respect” button, users engaged with the content and each other in a less partisan way. In a few cases, the “respect” button led people to be more willing to click on comments expressing politics that differed from their own.