"It’s a social network that doesn’t try to be neutral and isn’t attempting to preserve free speech. It’s trying to make the internet a nicer place to be."
"Mozilla’s content policies also make clear that the platform will err on the side of protecting people who need to be protected..."
Looks like we don't need laws after all for platforms to opportunistically suppress political user content: In 🇫🇷 #France, a #Snapchat#lobbyist admitted in a parliamentary hearing that the company was "proud" to have collaborated "hand in hand with the interior ministry" to make sure only user content critical of the mass protests was shown on #SnapMaps.
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Instagram#Meta#Ads: "Instagram limited the reach of a 404 Media investigation into ads for drugs, guns, counterfeit money, hacked credit cards, and other illegal content on the platform within hours of us posting it. Instagram said it did this because the content, which was about Instagram’s content it failed to moderate on its own platform, didn’t follow its “Recommendation Guidelines.” Later that evening, while that post was being throttled, I got an ad for “MDMA,” and Meta’s ad library is still full of illegal content that can be found within seconds.
This means Meta continues to take money from people blatantly advertising drugs on the platform while limiting the reach of reporting about that content moderation failure. Instagram's Recommendation Guidelines limit the reach of posts that "promotes the use of certain regulated products such as tobacco or vaping products, adult products and services, or pharmaceutical drugs.""
The European Commission has launched its transparency database of platforms‘ #contentmoderation decisions (statements of reasons in #digitalservicesact lingo). It already contains thousands of records from platforms such as #TikTok that will hopefully give some quantitative insights into their content moderation approaches, the degree of automation etc. Unfortunately, the qualitative information on individual decisions is very limited. https://transparency.dsa.ec.europa.eu/statement
@mmasnick, Randy Lubin, and Leigh Beadon developed this really fun game, exploring the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in managing a trust and safety team.
I was immediately hooked and ended with these scores:
Interested in #contentmoderation? The EU is inviting researchers to develop tools to make use of #platform#transparency data under the #DSA: https://hackathon.peren.fr/ (can't link directly to the English version for some reason, switch to English in top right corner in desktop view)
"Helen McEntee says X, formerly Twitter, did not cooperate with Gardaí in taking down 'vile messages' last Thursday. ... 'They [other companies] were taking down their vile messages. X were not. They did not engage. They did not fulfil their own customer standards,' she said."
Last night, after a tip-off, I decided to start checking out the instances federated with BSD Cafe. I came across some truly appalling instances, featuring horrible images and content that could end up on our timeline. As a result, I've begun integrating some blocklists into BSD Cafe, taking a gradual approach to avoid going overboard with the blocks.
This has led to the immediate removal of over 10 followers from my profile—potentially good folks, but from highly questionable instances. I can't stand by as BSD Cafe gets tainted with such materials.
Friends of the Fediverse, choose your instances wisely. It will ensure a far better experience for everyone.
“[The] capacity for outsiders to gain voice and win is a really valuable part of the internet. At the same time, what we’ve seen both in politics and media is that the absence of gatekeepers has this real downside.” –@owasow
As applications like ChatGPT and rival products rise in popularity, experts and stakeholders are split on whether and how Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act — a liability shield for internet companies over third-party content — should apply to the new tools.
Ashley Johnson, a senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said the “most likely scenario” is if generative AI is challenged in court, it “probably won’t be considered covered by Section 230.”
“It would be very difficult to argue it is content that the platform, or service, or whoever is being sued in this case had no hand in creating if it was their AI platform that generated the content,” Johnson said."
Hier porträtiert das Magazin Rest Of World den Gründer der Kenyan Content Moderators’ Union: Nathan Nkunzimana. Es geht um traumatisierende Arbeit in der Inhaltsmoderation, um Ausbeutung im Globalen Süden und um Arbeitskampf.
"The man leading Kenyan content moderators’ battle against Meta"
For the first time today I added an "altered content" liable to my Youtube video because I used two photos that were generated by AI.
It is a new policy by #YouTube. I've read the guidelines & examples.
Since I'm very interested in #ContentModeration want to now what it means for political speech on YouTube this election?
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
@CenDemTech has started a research project about content moderation in the Global South / Majority World. We will examine how content moderation systems work in social media and other online services in "low resource" languages in Africa, South Asia, and South America. We will partner with digital rights organizations in these regions and if you are working on this topic it would be great to connect.
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Polarization#Ideology: "Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. And when that happens, in any forum, the posters blame the mods.
The mods do have supporters: “normie” liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function. A central question of our current moment is whether that faith is enough to unite a critical mass of voters, or whether the medium we have chosen for everything, from photos of our children to our most private conversations, will simply not allow for any consensus, especially one that appeals to a population as broadly complacent as the American consumer class. Normies, who are mostly unified in their defense of the status quo, still wield a reasonable amount of political power, and they will continue to exist in some form. But, as even more of our lives take place within the distortions of online life, how much longer will there be a widely agreed-upon status quo to defend?" https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/arguing-ourselves-to-death
Community members who initially find moderation efforts to be stifling will often come around to see them as a differentiating factor that sets your community apart. Here's one such story:
@admin Hmm, interesting. He joined on January 21st with a reason: ”I want to join the greate community and to chat with other members and to contribute to the community” and I suspended him February 6th because of spam. So he could have not caused further spam from my server because I do not have open registration. But I may be a target because of this.