#SocialMedia#Twitter#China#ContentModeration#Propaganda#Disinformation: "Lax content moderation on X (aka Twitter) has disrupted coordinated efforts between social media companies and law enforcement to tamp down on "propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence US politics," The Washington Post reported.
Now propaganda is "flourishing" on X, The Post said, while other social media companies are stuck in endless cycles, watching some of the propaganda that they block proliferate on X, then inevitably spread back to their platforms.
#SocialMedia#Meta#Facebook#Instagram#Censorship#Zionism#ContentModeration: "FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM’S parent company, Meta, is contemplating stricter rules around discussing Israeli nationalism on its platforms, a major policy change that could stifle criticism and free expression about the war in Gaza and beyond, five civil society sources who were briefed on the potential change told The Intercept.
“Meta is currently revisiting its hate speech policy, specifically in relation to the term ‘Zionist,’” reads a January 30 email sent to civil society groups by Meta policy personnel and reviewed by The Intercept. While the email says Meta has not made a final determination, it is soliciting feedback on a potential policy change from civil society and digital rights groups, according to the sources. The email notes that “Meta is reviewing this policy in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported” but does not detail the content in question or name any stakeholders.
“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’ — a political ideology — as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’ — an ethno-religious identity,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the groups Meta has contacted to discuss the possible change. Noble added that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”" https://theintercept.com/2024/02/08/facebook-instagram-censor-zionist-israel/?utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
#SocialMedia#Disinformation#ContentModeration: To keep pace with the threat posed by bad actors, social media platforms don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They should reduce complexity and go back to basics.
First, policies that suppress freedom of expression must specify the real-world harm they are trying to prevent. There are clear tensions between allowing freedom of expression and protecting people from real-world harm. The user’s intent, and how other users understand their content, is key to determining the likelihood of such harm.
Second, in crisis situations, including elections where the risk of violence is high, policies should reflect threats to physical safety and security. A clear system for moderating content in a crisis is important.
Third, transparency is fundamental. Only by showing how decisions are made and holding people to account can we build trust. The Board has pushed Meta to share its metrics for how it monitors its efforts leading up to, during, and after “expected critical events,” such as elections. The company expects to publish these in the latter half of 2024."
@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.
"Social media company X is in the process of hiring 100 content moderators for a new office in Austin, Texas that will focus on fighting child abuse content, a goal it hopes to complete by the end of the year, an X executive said on Saturday. The Elon Musk-owned company announced the new 'Trust and Safety center of excellence' ahead of a U.S. Senate hearing on Jan. 31 about online child sexual exploitation."
@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.
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)
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Meta#Sama#Facebook#Instagram#Kenya: "The constant feed of atrocity took its toll. Many of the moderators said they had been left shells of themselves, with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, unable to sleep or to interact normally with other people. Some shunned crowded spaces, associating them with bomb blasts, drone attacks or acts of random killing. Fascia Gebrekidan, who studied journalism in Tigray and had come to Kenya to escape the war in Ethiopia, was horrified to watch a daily diet of her countrymen killing each other. “Seeing people being droned every day,” she said, “that really made me question my faith in God.”
By 2023, as part of a legal suit that Ranta and her co-workers would bring against Sama and Meta, the moderators alleged that exposure to such harmful images, without what they deemed adequate counselling, constituted a violation of their human rights. While Sama has said the company harnessed the power of markets for “social good” and that it had helped lift thousands of people out of poverty, lawyers acting on the moderators’ behalf submitted court filings that said otherwise. They conjured images of a “digital sweatshop” and, in conversation, compared the content moderators toiling in the bowels of the internet with industrial workers of a previous age labouring in dark Satanic mills or chiselling coal beneath the Earth’s crust."
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Algorithms#AI#Disinformation: "We need to clean up our online platforms. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research, advocacy, and policy organization working to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation, has called for the adoption of its STAR Framework (Safety by Design, Transparency, Accountability, and Responsibility). This would ensure that digital products and services are safe before they are launched; increase transparency around algorithms, rule enforcement, and advertising; and work to hold companies both accountable to democratic and independent bodies, and responsible for omissions and actions that lead to harm. The EU’s Digital Services Act is a step in the right direction of regulation, including provisions to ensure that independent researchers can monitor social network platforms. However, these provisions will take years to be actionable. The UK’s Online Safety Bill—slowly making its way through the policy process—could also help, but again, these provisions will take time to implement. Until then, the transition from social media to AI-mediated information means that, in 2024, a new digital dark age will likely begin."
#EU#Algorithms#AI#AIAct#SocialMedia#Surveillance#ContentModeration: "These successes are small compared to the energy deployed to build and deploy automated systems in Europe. Our most significant setback probably occurred on 13 September, when the president of the European Commission said in her state of the Union address that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”. The sentence may be innocuous in itself. However, it reveals that the ideology that considers AI might become godlike has permeated the highest echelons of political power. One of the problems of this ideology is that it disregards the current, actual risks and failures of automated systems, making it much harder to find solutions and help people affected.
How do we go forward in such an environment? The chances that algorithmic systems will strengthen justice, democracy, and sustainability (AlgorithmWatch’s mission) in 2024 are slim. I do not expect PimEyes to remove the pictures it has of me. And I do not expect top politicians to stop using a social network where algorithms automatically favor far-right extremists."
The challenge with labeling Mastodon instances as a “community” is there is a non-trivial percentage of users who don’t have just one community, interest, or affiliation.
In a scathing 51-page report, the organization documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company exhibited “six key patterns of undue censorship” of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians, including the taking down of posts, stories and comments; disabling accounts; restricting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts; and “shadow banning”, where the visibility and reach of a person’s material is significantly reduced, according to HRW.
Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said."
#EU#DSA#SocialMedia#Twitter#ContentModeration: "While the EU executive has sent requests to other systemic platforms for information on how they comply with the DSA obligations in the past weeks, this infringement proceeding is the first enforcement action under the new law.
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who in several instances in the past made public statements assuming the role of the digital regulator, announced the action precisely on X and mentioned three areas of investigation.
These areas include a suspected breach of obligations to counter illegal content and disinformation, a suspected breach of transparency obligations and a suspected deceptive design of the user interface."
#AI#ContentModeration#AdTech#Recommendation#Automation#News#Media#Journalism: "Automated systems and processes are a common feature of the news and media environment. This report introduces four key examples: search, recommendation, automated content moderation and curation, and advertising technology (AdTech). We provide a basic explanation of how these systems work at the technical level and show how they operate in context, drawing on examples and case studies across news and media. We then map emerging challenges associated with the use of each technology across the news and media environment, drawing on peer-reviewed research from multiple disciplines. The findings and outcomes of current research in this area from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are featured throughout. We end by identifying several critical areas where future work is needed to help ensure the safe and responsible deployment of automated systems across news and media."
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:
#SocialMedia#Facebook#Meta#Kenya#ContentModeration: "For the past eight months, Nathan Nkunzimana has been making a living by selling packaged water from a stall in Lavington, a residential suburb of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. He runs his business from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday, offering doorstep deliveries for orders worth over 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($6.52). This routine is a big shift for Nkunzimana, who had worked as a content moderator at Sama — Meta’s former moderation partner in Africa — for two years until April 2023.
At Sama, the 34-year-old sat at a desk inside an air-conditioned office for up to nine hours a day, reviewing posts on Instagram and Facebook, and deleting content that violated the platforms’ guidelines.
In April, Sama decided to discontinue content moderation work and did not renew the contracts of its 249 moderators, including Nkunzimana. “The company promised us heaven and earth when we were employed, but all of a sudden, we got laid off. It’s been frustrating,” he told Rest of World.
Besides running his packaged-water shop, Nkunzimana has spent the last eight months organizing his former colleagues to get Sama to reinstate their jobs."
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"
#EU#EMFA#MediaFreedomAct#PressFreedom#DigitalRights#ContentModeration: "Millions of EU users trust that online platforms will take care of content that violates community standards. But contrary to concerns raised by EFF and other civil society groups, Article 17 of the EMFA enforces a 24-hour content moderation exemption for media, effectively making platforms host content by force.
This “must carry” rule prevents large online platforms like X or Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, from removing or flagging media content that breaches community guidelines. If the deal becomes law, it could undermine equality of speech, fuel disinformation, and threaten marginalized groups. It also poses important concerns about government interference in editorial decisions.
Imagine signing up to a social media platform committed to removing hate speech, only to find that EU regulations prevent platforms from taking any action against it."
This is the kind of question that drives engagement! 1.1 Million votes! #ElonMusk doesn't think about the harm his decisions have on real people. Do the #SandyHook parents have any say? #ContentModeration at #Twitter is practically nonexistent, what happens when #AlexJones violates a TOS or a law?
How long would his defamation or disinformation stay up, causing NEW harm?
CompuServe had some interesting differences from nearly any section of the internet today. For various reasons, people were charged by the hour, which meant they were charged by the minute to use it. So in the back of one’s mind was always a question of whether this extra minute was worth it.
So I think it tended to make people more conscious of how online they were, even if they found it compelling.
I don’t mean to portray this as a better world. I’m just saying it was a different one.
I’m very interested in ways to see how people can gather with a sense of shared ownership rather than a corporate patron overseeing the conversation."