Social Platform Trust & Safety

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

Jay Van Bavel, PhD (@jayvanbavel.bsky.social)

Few serious observers can consider what we might call the “public square” platforms—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the public square’s library, Google—a boon to democracy. Nor are they a flourishing intellectual marketplace. Although it is tempting to shrug at their problems by comparing them to the heated partisan newspapers of the e... See more

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

Putting aside the mechanics of algorithmic feeds, it feels like there’s often a mismatch between the international user base of a platform and the national “democracy” about which these points are being made

Duco+TnS+MRR-+FINAL

A comprehensive report highlighting the importance of investment in the trust and safety industry, emphasizing its growth potential, corporate benefits, and role in fostering safer online environments amidst emerging technologies.

Link

Duco Trust & Safety Market Research Report (Katie Harbath)

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.

Bonfire

bonfirenetworks.org

User research about ways to counter mininformation in social networks - from Bonfire

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

But how do you monitor or take responsibility for what everyone says anywhere all the time? Well, you don’t. You can’t. Providing everyone with bandwidth and software keeps expense growth arithmetic. But if you try to exert any control over how it’s used then expenses become exponential too. It’s impossible to do within the business model. Everythi... See more

The Economics That Define Social Media

“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 i

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