Facebook's approach to content moderation typically involves only post-publication content moderation, on a case-by-case basis — and only when content has been flagged for review.
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COMO III: Content Moderation and the Future of Online Speech I'll be in New York City on Thursday to speak at this conference about content moderation on big platforms.
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No one is happy with YouTube's content moderation policies YouTube's content moderation policies spawned lawsuits from an unlikely alliance: a conservative nonprofit and a group of left-leaning LGBTQ+ YouTubers.
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Why AI can't fix content moderation Today on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel interviews UCLA professor Sarah T. Roberts' about her new book Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.
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Content moderation workers in particular will get $22 an hour.
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And more content moderation requirements are coming in Europe — fast.
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Have you done content moderation work for a tech giant?
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It's been a big week for tales of content moderation.
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Managers at the content moderation sites earn $16 an hour.
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Content moderation is important and logistically thorny, but not existential.
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Human workers are still essential to Facebook's content moderation system.
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The content moderation industry is growing as the platforms do.
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The accounts highlight social media companies' continuing issues with content moderation.
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I don't understand what is the goal of Facebook's content moderation.
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Content moderation is a long-standing challenge for big tech companies.
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Have you encountered this sort of AI vision of content moderation?
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Context is everything in content moderation, and this article illustrates why.
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This last six months largely focused on content moderation and enforcement.
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He knew mobile and content moderation failures could kill his network.
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Catherine Buni reports on online content moderation for The Investigative Fund.
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Tasks can include categorization/content moderation, comparison, transcription, and phone calling.
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Is this just a way of offloading responsibility for content moderation?
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Facebook has been forced to increase its investment in content moderation.
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For years tech companies have been getting free content moderation from journalists.
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We took a look at the bleak world of content moderation training.
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Facebook has faced major criticism over how it deals with content moderation.
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YouTube will have 10,000 people working on content moderation in some form.
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It declined to share any additional details about its content-moderation practices.
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Tech giants like Facebook have been criticized for its inconsistent content moderation.
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Over the past several years, content moderation has reached a breaking point.
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Photo: APSeemingly with each passing week, YouTube faces another content moderation problem.
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New York (CNN)Facebook is admitting it needs oversight with content moderation.
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The board will make rulings about content moderation on Facebook and Instagram.
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Content moderation is art not science, as well… Or art and science.
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"The problem is that the content moderation should be done with transparency."
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More rules of the road for platforms regarding speech and content moderation?
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Today, Facebook's content moderation is increasingly done through automated flagging and removal.
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It's designed to provide an independent appeals process for content moderation rulings.
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Social media platforms have largely taken content moderation into their own hands.
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Other times the posts came down because of over-cautious content moderation.
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L1ght said that Giphy is already aware of its content moderation problems.
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Facebook has its content moderation panel that they're hoping will save them.
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Many of the issues surrounding content moderation have been reported on extensively by The Verge, and they're now the focus of UCLA professor Sarah T. Roberts' new book Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.
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A federalized content moderation policy, for example, might better balance speech and security.
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Facebook still hasn't been publicly transparent about its internal rules on content moderation.
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Content moderation, which is a nice way of saying censorship, or possibly not?
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Mr Dorsey later answered pointed questions from a House committee about content moderation.
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Companies are facing new questions on content moderation following the New Zealand attack.
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I think we have more than 30,19303 people who are doing content moderation.
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Media coverage of Facebook and content moderation often appears to be contradicting itself.
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At VidCon, creators complained about YouTube's content moderation problems, according to Buzzfeed News.
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But you also see members talking about election interference, antitrust issues, content moderation.
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Facebook recently announced it will double its content moderation team to 20,000 employees.
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The fact remains, there's no clear content moderation or curation policy on Steam.
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This legal team will focus on US content moderation, according to the statement.
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Facebook has prioritized content moderation and harassment from early on in its history.
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Google's contractors handle a range of jobs, from content moderation to software testing.
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She declined to elaborate about how the policy was impacting content moderation specifically.
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The new body will be empowered to pass binding decisions on content moderation.
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Even a single incident can cause havoc for the company's content moderation teams.
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MUNICH - FACEBOOK'S ZUCKERBERG SAYS THESE ARE ELECTIONS, PRIVACY, CONTENT MODERATION AND DATA PORTABILITY
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"The fundamental reason for content moderation—its root reason for existing—goes quite simply to the issue of brand protection and liability mitigation for the platform," Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who studies commercial content moderation, told Motherboard.
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That's just the reality of the world that we're moving towards with content moderation.
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Platforms' content moderation policies certainly remain a bone of contention for governments and lawmakers.
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This whole debacle is unsurprising, given YouTube's less than celebrated history of content moderation.
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It doubled its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 this year.
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Let's be clear too that there are ways of doing content moderation at scale.
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Please add that to your content moderation guidelines and update your blogging strategy accordingly.
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But a promising application of AI is rescuing humans from horrific content moderation jobs.
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It's a tale of two content moderation decisions, made six months apart in 2013.
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She also said the company continues to invest in AI for content moderation purposes.
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Facebook clearly has—and has had for a while—a problem with content moderation.
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This research could be applied to discrimination surveillance and content moderation, the study said.
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Facebook has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies over recent years.
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From the beginning, 8chan branded itself as a space free from any content moderation.
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We have also finished a full investigation into our content moderation systems and processes
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Facebook recently announced an oversight board with independent experts to help monitor content moderation.
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Meanwhile, here's your content moderation story of the day, from David Gilbert at Vice.
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Besides the addictiveness of tech, they cover children's privacy, online gaming and content moderation.
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It's not even really about content moderation, a huge and thorny issue for Facebook.
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Critics noted that more private tweeting would help it dodge concerns about content moderation.
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Sandberg has asked to receive weekly briefs of the platform's top content moderation concerns.
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This piece is part of an ongoing Motherboard series on Facebook's content moderation strategies.
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As you may have heard, YouTube is growing its content moderation team to 10,000 staffers.
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I think on the content moderation extremism, the United States is out of the game.
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So in the long run this will reduce the need for growth of content moderation.
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But the Logan Paul incident highlights the consistently inconsistent application of YouTube's content moderation rules.
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Facebook's leadership cannot be accused of being blind to concerns about its content moderation failures.
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Some tech giants pay for this work, building content moderation teams numbering in the thousands.
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Pinterest has actually taken the most definitive action on anti-vaccination content moderation to date.
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Cognizant runs a content moderation site for Facebook that employs around 2202,2628 people in Arizona.
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Over the last few months, YouTube has come under fire for its content moderation decisions.
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Cognizant runs a content moderation site for Facebook that employs around 1,000 people in Arizona.
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In terms of content, that clear identity also provides self-assured guidance to content moderation.
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Content moderation is also a volume issue; millions of content reports flood its system weekly.
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Reddit has often taken a different approach to content moderation compared to other tech platforms.
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ByteDance responded by doubling its content moderation team and developing stronger systems for checking content.
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After fixing the bug in our content moderation filters and confirming that the sticker was
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Imgur does have a "mini-team around spam" plus a content moderation squad, Sarah says.
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The Silicon Valley search giant has previously denied its content moderation decisions are politically motivated.
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Amazon's strange user-uploaded content ultimately points to an even larger challenge of content moderation.
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"The complexities (by its own design) of Facebook's content moderation solution mean that the introduction of errors can happen at many points in the production chain," Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who studies commercial content moderation, told Motherboard in an email.
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Meanwhile, the company is testing changes to the content moderation tools used by Facebook's human reviewers.
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That followed the December 27 New York Times article on Facebook's disorganized global content moderation efforts.
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The first concerns Facebook's plan to build a kind of independent Supreme Court for content moderation.
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She used it as an opportunity to look at the limits of content moderation at scale.
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It also partnered with a third-party fact-checking service and hired a content moderation team.
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But most charges of anti-conservative bias in policy and content moderation haven't survived close examination.
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What makes those alternatives more appealing to developers is also Valve's lax approach to content moderation.
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The platforms also have less rarefied reasons to keep content moderation out of the public eye.
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But this sentiment assumes Facebook's system of content moderation will never evolve beyond its policy handbook.
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It certainly seems possible that AI will improve Facebook's content moderation efforts, but it remains unproven.
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And it does not prove that content moderation is the right way to address this complicity.
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"After investigation, a bug was found in our content moderation filters affecting stickers," the company said.
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A government regulatory agency could consult on and review the content moderation procedures at major platforms.
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Content moderation is a deeply complex and incomprehensibly difficult undertaking on platforms with billions of users.
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Arvato CRM provides services such as live chat, video identification procedures and content moderation for Facebook .
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""Source: Vice, Twitter, RecodeGot a tip on content moderation and product regulation at major tech companies?
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When it comes to Facebook's content moderation, however, we are still very much in the present.
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Our political discourse takes a major hit when tech companies get it wrong on content moderation.
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How do you think things are going to pan out in the area of content moderation?
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Again and again, the act of reporting out a story gets reduced to outsourced content moderation.
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Over the past few years, Facebook has caught fire from all sides for its content moderation.
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Pinterest said this was the result of a quirk of the company's internal content moderation tools.
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Like Facebook, Reddit's new policy protects satire and parody, and users can appeal content moderation decisions.
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The move is the latest example in Pinterest leading the tech industry in progressive content moderation.
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On paper, she said, this approach to content moderation is easier to enforce than blanket policies.
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The Facebook appeals process was largely an attempt to balance the company's quickly expanding content moderation process.
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Investors are likely concerned that the company's margins will shrink as it spends more on content moderation.
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I think specifically for content moderation, you have to think about what the mental health impacts are.
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The platform has insisted it retired those content moderation guidelines when the platform "took off" in May.
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On Tuesday, representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube testified to lawmakers about their platforms' content moderation strategies.
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No matter what companies say, AI is not going to solve the problem of content moderation online.
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Yes, tech companies have failed to invest in content moderation, and for a specific reason: it's intentional.
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The tasks vary widely, and can include transcription, writing, editing, and content moderation, among many other things.
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Image: APSince it debuted nearly a year ago, Facebook Live has been rife with content moderation problems.
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Content moderation systems have historically been incredibly expensive to create and even then don't work that well.
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Yet most of the questions about content moderation that YouTube wrestles with are much less clear-cut.
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The wider issue here is that Facebook's content moderation system remains very clearly very far from perfect.
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Today we look into unpaid content moderation, a thankless job that keeps online communities like Reddit safe.
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In July, executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified before Congress about their company's content moderation practices.
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But Facebook users, for example, have been creative in their efforts to sidestep the company's content moderation.
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The data highlights the sheer scale of the content moderation challenge facing Facebook and other social networks.
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This could include anything from appointment scheduling to more complicated matters like content moderation, transcriptions, and more.
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I thought this Washington Post interview with Tarleton Gillespie, an academic who studies content moderation, was illuminating.
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He also talked about his plans to build AI software to automate some of this content moderation.
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Content moderation and deciding what counts as political speech has historically been a sore spot for Facebook.
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Google and other companies have denied that users' political views shape their content moderation and advertising policies.
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As I wrote in 2018, we are well into the "take it down" era of content moderation.
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As a European Union member, it can influence regulations on privacy, competition, content moderation, taxes and misinformation.
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"A perfect content moderation regime likely is too much to hope for," I wrote at the time.
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I'm sure you've heard this many times on this stage, content moderation at scale is very, very challenging.
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Norai's experience at tech companies is in content moderation—deciding, essentially, what speech needs to be taken down.
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A LinkedIn search for Periscope turned up no employees whose job title reflected user safety or content moderation.
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Content moderation decisions are often incredibly complex, regularly presenting those making them with a lot of bad options.
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Instead, it's relied on users flagging abuse like racial slurs, and it recently revealed its content moderation guidelines.
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The U.S. has thankfully very few rules around speech, and today's content moderation systems generally handle those expeditiously.
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Thursday, Facebook released an update on its content moderation practices, which included a new section for appeal results.
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Twitter and other tech companies are increasingly under scrutiny regarding many of their business practices, including content moderation.
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The approval comes as world leaders are hotly debating the balance between free speech and content moderation online.
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Still, she adds, the paper makes it clear that we need to be very serious about content moderation.
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Facebook will create an independent oversight body to adjudicate appeals on content moderation issues, the company said today.
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On Sunday afternoon we learned about Facebook's internal content moderation rules from a massive leak by The Guardian.
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It's very possible that someone may have flagged my image as sensitive, and Twitter's content moderation team agreed.
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They threaten all kinds of things like content moderation bills, algorithm transparency bills, bills around ... That'll be interesting.
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Both the Commission and some EU member states have been pushing for increased automation of content moderation online.
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Facebook is in the process of establishing an independent oversight board to review its decisions on content moderation.
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She writes about technology, psychology, and the law and is currently working on a project about content moderation.
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Late last year, he proposed an independent commission to handle difficult content moderation decisions by social media platforms.
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More Facebook news: The company said it would create an independent oversight group to review content moderation appeals.
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YouTube, like all social media platforms, has been grappling with the matter of content moderation in recent years.
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The board was proposed in 2018 as an independent authority to help users appeal Facebook's content moderation decisions.
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The company has moved forward with plans to invent a "Supreme Court"-like independent content moderation appeals board.
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The companies have been ramping up content moderation and hiring more human fact-checkers to rein in abuse.
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But the need for content moderation is better looked at as a systemic issue in Facebook's business model.
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For example, he is attempting to set up a Supreme Court-style independent tribunal to handle content moderation.
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But content moderation teams are primarily focused on responding to reports from users, rather than hunting down bad actors.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story linked to the wrong YouTube blog post announcing changes to content moderation.
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The letter urges Facebook to be more transparent about its content moderation process and prioritize working with local groups.
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German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has obtained what it says are internal documents used to guide content moderation on Facebook.
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Ellen Silver, Facebook's vice president of operations, acknowledged to Reuters that content moderation "at this size is uncharted territory".
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The two goals directly compete, and Silicon Valley companies are rightfully dragging their heels in avoiding deep content moderation.
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Content moderation is key, and Rydzak cited a decision from Facebook last summer that limited message forwarding on WhatsApp.
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The recurrence of the bestiality thumb issue suggests that content moderation may perhaps be an intractable problem for YouTube.
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But a December 2017 BuzzFeed News report revealed a flawed content moderation process with confusing and sometimes contradictory guidelines.
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One reason content moderation is hard to investigate is that social-media companies prefer not to talk about it.
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Twitter deploys a more multifaceted approach to content moderation than simply allowing accounts to stay online or banning then.
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Whether you agree with Facebook's content moderation decisions or not, it's impossible to argue that they are consistently enforced.
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The Moderators is a fly-on-the-wall glimpse into a training seminar on internet content moderation in India.
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A change in YouTube's content moderation system has left many video creators uncertain of their place on the platform.
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And I want to get to the wacky stuff at the end, the content moderation, things like that. Okay.
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There's a new documentary by two directors from Germany who wanted to explore what is this content moderation industry.
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Amid a series of unfolding humanitarian crises, Facebook has been under pressure to improve content moderation around the globe.
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The companies have all denied that politics play any role in their decisionmaking when it comes to content moderation.
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Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should try spending one day at Facebook's nightmarish content moderation center in Tampa, Florida
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Facebook content moderation firm asked on-site therapists to disclose counseling details with employees, according to an Intercept report.
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On the back end, the company has made this type of material a priority in queues for content moderation.
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For officials such as Saneem in Fiji, Facebook's efforts to improve content moderation and language support are painfully slow.
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Gab itself was started by far-right users unhappy with content moderation and user bans on Twitter and Facebook.
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Her research on social media content moderation has been featured in venues like The Guardian and The Washington Post.
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They should partner with local and global eating disorder charities to seek advice on best practices for content moderation.
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Congress understood that if you made people liable for being good Samaritans that you would get no content moderation.
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As TikTok continues its rapid U.S. growth, the company is being challenged to better explain its content moderation choices.
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Both Twitter and Instagram announced new content moderation policies to help prevent online harassment and bullying earlier this year.
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That laissez-faire approach to content moderation was met with absolute vilification by many technology experts and critics alike.
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Last month, it also announced it had hired an independent American law firm to review its content moderation practices.
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Many Big Tech platforms, including Google, have also faced repeated accusations of bias in content moderation, particularly from conservatives.
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He conceived it as an alternative to 4chan, one with an even stauncher commitment to anything-goes content moderation.
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The 411 on content moderation To make that claim, we need to understand the status quo in moderation today.
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Facebook has partnered with law enforcement in the UK to obtain footage to train its automated content moderation tools.
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To be fair, there is a lot of nuance for Facebook to communicate when it comes to content moderation.
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Facebook has said the company had 15,000 workers doing content moderation, nearly double what it had just last April.
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Blued has a content-moderation team that works around the clock, making sure all content is by the book.
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But still, many of the highest-profile content moderation decisions seem to be made only after there's publicity around them.
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This is perhaps the most important intervention: legal enforcement and content moderation can only treat the symptoms of online abuse.
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That's important, as a bulk of the company's content moderation work is actually done overseas, in places like the Philippines.
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In short, the swarm of headlines about content moderation over the past week should not be mistaken as a coincidence.
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But that's not how content moderation typically works: In most instances, companies rely on their users to report one another.
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Interviewees from mid-size grassroots organizations told the team that Facebook's appeals process for content moderation decisions were too opaque.
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In November, Zuckerberg announced a plan for a kind of Facebook "Supreme Court" to deal with complex content moderation choices.
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Big technology companies have become punching bags for Democrats and Republicans who have objected separately to policies around content moderation.
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Facebook agreed to double its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 even if that hurt its profits.
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The desk is part of a broader push to improve YouTube's content moderation system following a series of humiliating failures.
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The big picture: Last April, Zuckerberg first publicly floated the concept of a "Supreme Court"-like content moderation review board.
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So yes this is content moderation via pre-filtering — which is something the European Commission has also been pushing for.
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And it discusses the kind of free speech questions that are now being raised around online threats and content moderation.
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But it's struggled with backlash after changes to content moderation and censorship, and how to handle credit card processing fees.
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For all the reasons laid out by Radiolab, a perfect content moderation regime likely is too much to hope for.
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Four Sixty, for example, lets businesses pay for help creating shoppable photo galleries, content moderation, post scheduling, and other services.
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As is the case with content moderation on any platform this size, someone always finds a way around the rules.
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And Facebook says it's working on artificial intelligence technology that can help improve the efficacy of software in content moderation.
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A regulatory agency could provide a means for platforms to share best practices in content moderation, without raising antitrust concerns.
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Pinterest said they expected U.S. and European regulators to pass laws holding social networks accountable for more strict content moderation.
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Valve's recent activity around content moderation could be viewed as an outward indication of the company's ongoing conversations with Apple.
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Facebook's most visible response to it was to amp up content moderation aimed at keeping the platform safe and civil.
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Tech executives have long said they're deploying cutting-edge AI and automated content moderation systems to keep this from happening.
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For example, the report paints a detailed picture of how certain key aspects of Facebook's content moderation flow actually work.
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How will YouTube's new and improved content-moderation policies address disinformation sown from within the ranks of the media establishment?
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Facebook has revealed new details about its plan to create an oversight board to oversee content moderation on its platform.
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The companies have all denied that politics play any role in their decision-making when it comes to content moderation.
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"Humans already struggle with determining intent," Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who studies commercial content moderation, said.
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In Berlin, Facebook's partner Arvato will employ up to 700 staff for "content moderation" by the end of the year.
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In one exchange, an employee inquired about news reports on Facebook's army of 30,000 contract workers responsible for content moderation.
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Facebook's 251,258-strong content moderation workforce speaks about 240 tongues, though the company said it hires professional translators when needed.
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The worst case scenario is that, to avoid having "knowledge" of sex trafficking, Internet services will stop content-moderation entirely.
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Earlier this month, TikTok hired a US law firm, including two former lawmakers, to help it revise content moderation policies.
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The closures of offices are impacting tech companies' content moderation efforts, as the contract employees responsible have been sent home.
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YouTube warned more videos than usual could be removed as content moderation becomes increasingly automated due to the coronavirus outbreak.
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TikTok has long denied that's the case, claiming that no governments — foreign or domestic — have directed its content moderation practices.
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I was in San Francisco to grill him on a number of thorny issues about online harassment and content moderation.
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Facebook's careful, creative effort to create a "Supreme Court"-like appeals board for content moderation decisions is one promising example.
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The company is building out a US-based leadership team, a US-based content moderation team; and localized community guidelines.
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"I agree," Doyle responded, noting a consensus that the state of online content moderation is lacking, to put it kindly.
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This week, TikTok announced it was hiring an outside law firm to review its content moderation policies and increase transparency.
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Tech executives argue that the law is still integral to their work, especially in allowing for "good faith" content moderation.
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One reason content moderation jobs offer a bad bargain to workers is that you never know when PTSD might strike.
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Motherboard interviewed an array of current employees, executives, and former employees of Twitter about how the company tackles content moderation.
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Since then, Zuckerberg has met with several other senators to discuss tech regulation ranging from competition policy to content moderation.
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Zuckerberg undoubtedly heard from the GOP senators he met with about complaints that Facebook's content moderation is biased against conservatives.
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While the company has taken steps to respond to these criticisms, it faces structural difficulties in its approach to content moderation.
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So, what I don't buy is the argument that the solution to our content moderation challenges is because we're so big.
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True, missing the boat on social media means thorny matters such as content moderation pose greater difficulties for Facebook and Google.
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Norai hadn't worked at Twitter during the bulk of the 2016 campaign, nor had he dealt with Trump-related content moderation.
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The episode occurred as part of a BBC investigation into Facebook's content moderation systems, which the news organisation says isn't effective.
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President Emmanuel Macron announced in November that Facebook had taken his government's officials behind the scenes of the content moderation process.
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Separately, Instagram announced that it is building a tool to appeal content moderation decisions, such as those about anti-vaccination posts.
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He has a new book out about online extremism in which he argues for for more public media and content moderation.
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Facebook has said it is working to improve content moderation and is hiring more reviewers, including those with local language capabilities.
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Some of this distrust in TikTok may also stem from how little is known about its content moderation policies and practices.
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A U.K. parliamentary committee has also this month called on the government to look at imposing fines for content moderation failures.
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Facebook is clearly pinning its long-term hopes for the massive content moderation problem it is saddled with on future automation.
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Sign up for The Interface Third, Mark Zuckerberg posted a 2000,27-word "blueprint" on the future of content moderation on Facebook.
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" Image via ProPublica Facebook's content moderation training manual explains that "white men" are protected from hate speech, but not "black children.
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Titled "The Good Censor," it's a presentation that traces the evolution of content moderation on tech platforms to the present day.
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Facebook tripled the headcount of its content moderation and security team, taking a noticeable hit to its profits, yet toxicity persists.
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Even so, content moderation is too much modeled on a customer service framework: We provide the complaints, and the platform responds.
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Obviously not every TikTok is going to be hilarious, and without great content moderation, much of the videos are wildly problematic.
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A niche AI chip could aid in Facebook's content moderation battle, more accurately finding and removing abusive content across Facebook's platforms.
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But YouTube is going to find that shift toward increasing professionalism nearly impossible unless it solves its persistent content-moderation problem.
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YouTube is firefighting another child safety content moderation scandal which has led several major brands to suspend advertising on its platform.
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There's one later in the afternoon tomorrow which will already have been news, with Jack Dorsey by himself around content moderation.
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Facebook is facing intense regulatory and political scrutiny over issues including antitrust, data privacy, content moderation, and its digital currency plans.
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Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that frequently criticizes Big Tech's content moderation, thought it could be problematic.
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Last year, a coalition of advocacy groups published the Santa Clara Principles — new baseline rules for how content moderation should work.
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Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and India have adopted or are considering laws that require stricter content moderation by tech platforms.
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Zuckerberg added that Facebook gets criticized by people from both sides of the political spectrum for their decisions around content moderation.
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YouTube warned that the reliance on automated content moderation could lead to videos being taken down that don't violate community guidelines.
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The same goes for Gab and other social networks set up in protest of Big Tech's increasingly aggressive content-moderation efforts.
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Demonetization, or limiting ads—and thus revenue—on specific videos has become YouTube's default response when content moderation issues crop up.
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That provision, Section 230, has increasingly come under fire from lawmakers of both parties frustrated with tech companies' content moderation practices.
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Facebook announced its Oversight Board for content moderation will be staffed and running by this summer, per a company blog post.
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Social media app TikTok on Tuesday announced the hire of two former lawmakers for its team that develops content moderation policies.
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Meanwhile: Chinese-owned TikTok said it is forming a committee to determine what its U.S. policies should be around content moderation.
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Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), among other experts, to review its content moderation policies and overall transparency.
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But if you're policing the internet, you might be surprised to learn that content moderation is often a dead-end career.
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Originally, TikTok took a far more blunt approach to content moderation, seemingly in an effort to minimize any chance of controversy.
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And so Facebook continued to push into new territories, and it is still struggling with content moderation in some of them.
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TikTok's content moderation guidelines show it downranks content featuring the watermarks of competitors like Dubsmash TikTok's content moderation guidelines show it downranks content featuring the watermarks of competitors like Dubsmash TikTok also continues to aggressively buy users via ads on competing apps like Facebook thanks to the billions in funding raked in by its parent ByteDance.
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The company's first content moderation report, released Tuesday, finds that it's removing significantly more hate speech, propaganda, graphic violence, and sexual content.
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And if you're talking about the very hard, very editorial problem of content moderation, identifying terrorism is actually a relatively narrow challenge.
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But content moderation isn't a new problem for the platform, and it's not clear what a long-term fix might look like.
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Social media sites like Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook have their own issues with content moderation, relying on human judgment in most cases.
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The people interviewed were mainly concerned that the policies behind content moderation, ad approval, fact-checking and so on were inadequately explained.
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But he also conceded that Facebook needs to "do more", and cautioned that an AI fix for content moderation is "years" out.
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Now, Facebook gets to call all the shots, despite a content moderation team that has often gotten things wrong in the past.
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She is particularly good at depicting how the strange international network of content moderation mirrors the class divides of other globalised industries.
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After investigation of the incident, this sticker was available due to a bug in our content moderation filters specifically affecting GIF stickers.
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If WhatsApp can identify a particular a message's metadata precisely, it can tag that message as "fake news" after appropriate content moderation.
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And contextual content moderation is evidently a vast problem that requires far more resources that are being devoted to it by Facebook.
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Content moderation at large platforms depends on so-called crowdworkers, either internal to the company or contracted through third-party temporary services.
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For YouTubers who get wrongly caught up in the company's enormous, faceless content moderation machine, these volunteer crusaders are their last hope.
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In a previous statement about content removals, a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that ideology is not a factor in content moderation.
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ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, has braced itself for increased scrutiny as its popularity grows by bolstering its legal and content moderation teams.
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In addition, working conditions at the content moderation centers were reportedly dismal, with reports of rampant sexual harassment and stressful productivity requirements.
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Here is one of the robot-fighting videos that YouTube originally said depicted animal cruelty:YouTube's content moderation policies have been widely criticized.
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Facebook is pushing ahead with its plan to build a supreme court-like body to oversee content moderation on its social network.
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It's this law that allows tech companies to take a passive approach to content moderation; with Section 22020, nothing was at stake.
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Gillespie's title, "Custodians of the Internet," points to the ambivalence about the labor of content moderation that's shared by platforms and users.
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It's no secret that Facebook and Twitter struggle with content moderation, especially when it comes to content in languages other than English.
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At first, content moderation on social networks was a business problem: let in the nudity and the Nazis, and the community collapses.
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At first, content moderation on social networks was a business problem: let in the nudity and the Nazis, and the community collapses.
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Above all, they've tried to browbeat the companies into adopting better policies around things like fact-checking, content moderation, and political ads.
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Driving the news: TikTok is bringing on outside experts, including 2 former congressmen, to take a look at its content moderation policies.
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And there's Pinterest — yes, that Pinterest — which enacted tough and principled content moderation, the sort that its competitors have stridently avoided. 9.
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The same method is behind content moderation at Facebook and image detection for Ring's home surveillance tools (newly acquired by Amazon, naturally).
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The debate between Democrats running for president has mostly focused so far on data collection, privacy, content moderation, and corporate market power.
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The news is the latest content moderation debacle the video sharing platform is facing as it tries to expand around the world.
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So, what would you see — and then let's get questions from the audience — what would you see as fixing the content moderation issue?
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Last week, Facebook released a content moderation report that showed the company was catching more objectionable content, from sexualized nudity to terrorist propaganda.
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By the end of 2017, Facebook says it will have more than 700 employees working with content moderation partner Arvato, based in Berlin.
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The problem, as we've been discussing here on Techdirt for a while, is that content moderation at scale is impossible to get right.
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The government there has now proposed a new law aimed at standardizing social media platforms' content moderation processes to ensure compliance in future.
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Most content moderation happens via a powerful artificial intelligence that's constantly recommending more videos based on a user's previous behavior inside the app.
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Bob Duncan, who oversees Cognizant's content moderation operations in North America, says recruiters carefully explain the graphic nature of the job to applicants.
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Yet, like many tech companies, Facebook has kept extremely mum on the details of its content moderation strategy, even amid the deafening criticism.
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Facebook in its letter to the Biden campaign, which Vox also obtained, outlined many of its policies around political advertising and content moderation.
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Paul's video isn't something artificially intelligent moderation could catch on its own, two experts with a focus on content moderation told BuzzFeed News.
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I'm wondering if you think people have become less absolutist about the First Amendment when it comes to the internet and content moderation?
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Still, it's worth taking look, primarily for the way it frames the debate around content moderation for companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
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In the past few years, the workings of content moderation and its fundamental limitations have come to light, and this is good news.
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At the same time, there are — what look like — some big potential positives to analyzing spread, rather than content, for content moderation purposes.
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During that time, many YouTube users repeatedly flagged the video for deletion through the site's content moderation system, to no avail; uproar ensued.
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Or is the company simply tired of being yelled at for its content moderation failures and is using encryption as an escape hatch?
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Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all working to increase both automated and human content moderation, building new tools and hiring thousands of employees.
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For example, uploaders were able to use minor modifications, like watermarks or altering the size of clips, to stymie YouTube's content moderation tools.
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NIBBLES: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a swipe yesterday at the content moderation practices of social media rivals, my colleague Tony Romm reports.
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TikTok announced on Tuesday that it is working with a team including two former US lawmakers to review its new content moderation policy.
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Content moderation is a psychologically taxing job that involves reviewing some of the darkest and most gruesome text and videos on the internet.
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But considering the tech industry's track record on policing opioid sales, asking for help from already strained content moderation departments is no guarantee.
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That said, ongoing criticism of the effectiveness of Facebook's content moderation processes underline the scale of the company's own challenge on this front.
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Section 230 allows those services to moderate for undesirable content without fear that a mistake in content-moderation could land them in court.
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The platform has come under scrutiny in recent months from regulators, lawmakers, and politicians for its handling of user privacy and content moderation.
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Twitter and YouTube also warned that the shift to working from home and reliance on automated content moderation may lead to more mistakes.
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When Facebook's content moderation guidelines are already under scrutiny, would giving moderators more context open the door for more criticism, particularly from conservatives?
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Meanwhile, other legal analysts say it would be unprecedented for the FTC to prosecute a company over the way it justifies content moderation.
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Mr. Dorsey will then appear alone in the afternoon at a House Energy and Commerce committee hearing about content moderation on the sites.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously warned that addressing hate speech, election interference, and other content moderation and safety issues would be costly.
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TikTok announced Tuesday it had hired two former congressmen and was convening a panel of outside experts to review its content moderation policies.
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It's because of this content moderation flaw that activists of color who use Facebook for racial justice advocacy find their postings unfairly censored.
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The document may be one of the most stark acknowledgments so far of the effects of content moderation on workers&apos mental health.
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She focuses on children and technology, drawing on her time at Google to brief lawmakers about child privacy, child exploitation, and content moderation.
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Reddit and Wikipedia have more community-based models while some smaller companies allow moderators to have more responsibility in crafting content moderation policies.
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"TikTok has shown a real commitment to transparency and improving their overall content moderation processes," Denham said in a statement provided to POLITICO.
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At one point in the hearing, a lawmaker wondered if there was enough at stake for tech companies to care about content moderation.
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But the intractable problem is Facebook itself: If the mission remains to connect "everyone," then Facebook will never solve its content moderation problem.
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The report comes days after company CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a proposed external oversight board with the power to review Facebook's content moderation decisions.
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Missing from all this is a plan for a clearer terms of service, increased content moderation, and a commitment to enforcing its own rules.
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At the heart of the content moderation issue is a simple cost imbalance that rewards aggression by bad actors while punishing the platforms themselves.
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InfoWars has become a standard example for critics who say social media networks are selective about the enforcement of their own content moderation policies.
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Twitter responded to the organization's concerns "but refused to provide the data requested about the reporting process and content moderation," according to the report.
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It used pattern recognition to monitor user posts, tagging those suspected to include thoughts of suicide and forwarding them to its content moderation teams.
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Australia's public broadcaster ran an episode of the show Four Corners last month that included hidden camera footage of British Facebook content moderation training.
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If you read The Guardian's exposé on Facebook's leaked content moderation policies last year, some of the information made public today will look familiar.
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In particular, he was willing to address the issue of content moderation and whether the marketplace middlemen of the tech industry can be replaced.
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Silicon Valley tech companies are really, really, bad about content moderation, not because they can't do it, but because they specifically don't want to.
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And competition will provide better incentives for the new networks to untangle thorny problems around political speech, content moderation, platform integrity, and so on.
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And yet the more moderators I spoke with, the more I came to doubt the use of the call center model for content moderation.
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Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols.
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"They need to do a lot better," Hawley told Recode, ticking off his grievances on issues such as privacy, content moderation, and ad targeting.
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But companies born in democracies sometimes display their values, as when social networks cite the First Amendment in drafting their policies around content moderation.
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But some experts are beginning to suggest that Facebook made a strategic error in thinking of content moderation as a marginal or ancillary task.
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Giphy also released a statement today, apologizing for the "deeply offensive sticker" and attributing it to a bug in the system's content moderation filters.
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His piece reveals the existence of Operation Honey Badger, a content moderation shop focused on Asia that is run by Accenture on Facebook's behalf.
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As Motherboard has explored at length, content moderation on a platform as large as Facebook or YouTube is extraordinarily difficult, and mistakes are common.
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Facebook and other tech companies have started making major changes to their ad platforms, their data-sharing policies, and their approaches to content moderation.
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Still, questions linger about whether privacy, content moderation and proposed antitrust rules in the United States and other high-revenue countries will online advertising.
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The law puts Australia at the center of a contentious debate around free speech, censorship, and content moderation that's now raging across the globe.
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Facebook officials formally decided to ban "white nationalism" and "white separatism" on the platform at a content moderation meeting on Tuesday, according to Motherboard.
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The company has already been a target of conservative lawmakers who have claimed the company's approach to content moderation is influenced by political bias.
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Police recently arrested a security contractor who works at a Facebook content moderation facility in Phoenix, Arizona, for allegedly threatening people with a handgun.
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Is there a period of time where people are making content moderation decisions on a dummy site or test site or something like that?
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The report itself is split into four sections: content moderation and enforcement; advertising targeting practices; elections and census; and the civil rights accountability structure.
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Dongtu does not currently allow open uploads of user-generated content because doing so can be risky in China without significant content moderation efforts.
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But it shut down before the 2016 presidential election and didn't suffer from the same content moderation scandals as platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
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In the Video Op-Ed above, the Syrian activist and archivist Hadi Al Khatib urges platforms to overhaul and improve their content moderation systems.
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Facebook has been buffeted by a storm of controversy in recent years, with the social network&aposs privacy practices and content moderation under fire.
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The tools can variously describe famous landmarks, facial expressions, logos and gender, and have many applications including content moderation, scientific research, and identity verification.
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She said it would lead to an increase in sensitive data being shared and stored by platforms, and encourage companies to automate content moderation.
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Twitter has content moderation centers spread across the globe, with facilities in Toronto, Tokyo, San Francisco, Manila, Budapest, Warsaw, Dublin, and Bangalore, Twitter said.
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It also means that Patreon has faced many of the same content moderation dilemmas that have vexed much larger platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
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Board members with domain expertise, rendering decisions in public, could bring a legitimacy to Facebook's content moderation operations that it has never had before.
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The paper, "Testing Stylistic Interventions to Reduce Emotional Impact of Content Moderation Workers," described two experiments the company had conducted with its content moderators.
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That's why I've been so interested this year in Facebook's development of what it calls an "oversight board" — a Supreme Court for content moderation.
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While there's not a clear alternative content moderation model for big companies like Facebook and Google, Roberts said there are other approaches being taken.
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Despite the evidence showing Facebook's deference to that worldview, Marlow argued that Big Tech is still biased against the right in its content moderation.
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Steps like diversifying leadership, enabling greater local content moderation not outsourced to contractors, and engaging deeply with the communities where they operate are essential.
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Sandberg formed a team earlier this year to respond to content moderation issues in real time to get them in front of the CEO.
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Sandberg has overseen the teams in charge of content moderation for years, according to former Facebook employees who worked on the content policy team.
|
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"Sheryl was the court's highest authority for all the time I was there," an early Facebook employee who worked on content moderation told Motherboard.
|
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That kind of tracking, which is recommended as a best practice by content moderation experts, would make clear how TikTok enforces its own rules.
|
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It also highlights the fact that today's internet is sorely missing content moderation, something prioritized by the message boards where memes got their start.
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YouTube reverses ban for streamer who killed Red Dead Redemption 2 feminist I'd love to hear from subscribers interested in content moderation about this one.
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In these cases, the tech giant has got some free content moderation, while perhaps not providing the journalist much or any context for their piece.
|
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A Periscope post from late November addressing the sexual exploitation of children on the platform refers only to content moderation by a "committed team," singular.
|
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The company suffered its own privacy and content moderation reckoning, though arguably to a lesser degree than Facebook's, and defended its business practices before Congress.
|
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Lahiri, previously a senior director at Facebook and Instagram working on community standards and content moderation, is based in the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters.
|
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Facebook, Google (and by extension, YouTube), and Twitter are at a scale where they can do content moderation this way if they really wanted to.
|
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That's where another important factor, the inadequacy of which has probably led to the downfall of earlier anonymous messaging apps, comes into play: Content moderation.
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On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it's releasing its internal content moderation guidelines and giving the public a look into the way it develops its policies.
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"Ultimately, though, I don't believe content moderation is going away anytime soon, and so mediating it through transparency and due process is a great start."
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On Thursday, Motherboard's Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox posted their own history of content moderation on Facebook, but with an eye turned to the future.
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But if they don't, I return to the idea that the company ought to proceed with Zuckerberg's idea of a Supreme Court for content moderation.
|
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The big picture: The debate over bias continues to derail conversations about real content moderation problems, like the spread of terrorist content or child exploitation.
|
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With just 300 total employees and only a subset working on security or content moderation, WhatsApp seems understaffed to manage such a large user base.
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"For our associates who opt to work in content moderation, we are transparent about the work they will perform," a Cognizant spokesman said in response.
|
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Some criticized YouTube—whose parent company just reported a second-quarter profit of $3.2 billion—for outsourcing content moderation to an organization powered by volunteers.
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" Twitter spokesperson Raki Wane said that the company has been working to improve its content moderation and that they "always do look at the studies.
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Of course, if the app scales to support a larger number of users, Moov will need to concern itself with content moderation and managing spam.
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Minds eventually banned the accounts when Motherboard showed them to the platform, but the company's lax content moderation allowed them to proliferate unchecked for months.
|
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After this article was published, Twitter said in a statement that it regularly works with outside experts and academics to solve particular content moderation problems.
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""The tech we already have can do a vastly better job, but there is just no incentive for companies to deploy it for content moderation.
|
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Unlike previous criticisms of Facebook's content moderation strategy (of which there are many), this one is notable as it effectively comes from inside the house.
|
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also said it's hope is that developments in AI technology will enable it to automate content moderation at scale in time.
|
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And based on leaked information about content moderation, Facebook moderators have been told to pay close attention to any posts that mention 13 Reasons Why.
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Reports from The Verge have highlighted the troubling working conditions Facebook's content moderation contractors endure, which involves watching disturbing content for hours during a shift.
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What's next: The next phase of the audit is expected to address more specifically harassment and content moderation appeals and penalty systems, according to Murphy.
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It operates like so many other message boards on the internet, albeit with one huge difference: Everyone is anonymous, and there is no content moderation.
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He's a successful venture capitalist; she does content moderation at a search engine, weeding out hate speech, pornography and terrorist executions from the public domain.
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SMITH SAYS TECH COS ARE LIKELY TO CHANGE CONTENT MODERATION PRACTICES IN RESPONSE TO FOREIGN GOVTS EVEN IF U.S. TAKES NO ACTION ON SECTION 230
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Mashable has reached out to YouTube to find out more about what the company is doing to keep its content moderation team up and running.
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But the company has been transitioning jobs traditionally handled by contractors, such as content moderation, to full-time employees in recent weeks, reports The Information.
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Many employees who work on content moderation for YouTube — as well as for Facebook and Twitter — are contractors employed by companies like Accenture and Cognizant.
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"There's an increasingly loud call for the platforms to get involved in content moderation," said Cory Doctorow, a special adviser with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Still, threats continue to loom on the horizon for the company, including the risk of antitrust action and ongoing scrutiny of its content moderation practices.
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Thanks to everyone who came to The Glass Room this week to hear me talk with Clara Tsao about the many challenges of content moderation.
|
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Facebook could have spent the past two years quietly building up its security, content moderation, and fused messaging systems without bombast or delusions of grandeur.
|
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union's regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation and more.
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Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 2000,2150 third-party contractors, didn't always keep those employees on such a tight leash.
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A content moderation source said that Cognizant Technologies, a well-known contractor, has a contract with Twitter for this work; Twitter confirmed this to Motherboard.
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"A governmental entity telling platforms how to do content moderation raises some serious First Amendment concerns," another source familiar with the bill told The Hill.
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There are large content moderation sites in US cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Tampa, Florida, as well as internationally in India, the Philippines, and Dublin.
|
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The company has tried to work with more American groups, including hiring an independent American law firm in October to review TikTok's content moderation practices.
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Roberts, who has a book out in June on the genesis of content moderation work over the past decade, said that rings true to her.
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Facebook on Tuesday released its plans for the new board previously likened to a "Supreme Court" that can overturn the company's own content moderation decisions.
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And second, what would breaking up big technology companies mean for the tech policy issues driving much of the "techlash," like privacy and content moderation?
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Willner was instrumental in drafting Facebook's first content moderation policies, many of which have been only slightly tweaked in the years since they were written.
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Facebook has promised 20,000 employees will be working on content moderation and integrity concerns by the end of the year but says there are still limitations.
|
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Zuckerberg has faced increased scrutiny over content moderation as horrific tragedies like the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar have been fueled by the organizational potential of Facebook.
|
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The lawsuit sheds light on an extremely taxing job in the tech industry that rarely gets attention: content moderation — the removal of offensive or disturbing material.
|
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Though there are growing efforts to prevent secondary trauma in journalism and human-rights organizations, the picture is more complicated when it comes to content moderation.
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TikTok has faced scrutiny about its ties to China, and how much access and influence the Chinese government has to TikTok's user data and content moderation.
|
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If there is one policy dilemma facing nearly every tech company today, it is what to do about "content moderation," the almost-Orwellian term for censorship.
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A few days ago, France released a report that outlines what France — and maybe the European Union — plans to do when it comes to content moderation.
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"For most of their existence, social media platforms have maintained a convenient 'hands-off approach' to content moderation—out of sight, out of mind," she said.
|
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It seems Facebook has gotten to a comfortable place with its security staff-up in the wake of election interference, fake news, and content moderation troubles.
|
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He also mentioned again how Facebook is establishing an independent oversight board to hear appeals of the content moderation decisions Facebook does make (all the time).
|
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It remains to be seen whether the threat of new liability legislation will concentrate minds among tech giants to step up their performance on content moderation.
|
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David Wilner, an early Facebook employee who helped set up the company's original content moderation effort, told BuzzFeed News this is the hardest part of job.
|
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Democrats have often targeted them for poor data privacy practices, and Republicans have focused more on content moderation methods that they believe favor liberal-leaning views.
|
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As one of the most-visited services on the web, YouTube is under constant scrutiny for its policy decisions over content moderation, monetization, and other issues.
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"I'm not sure how this video was able to stream for [17] minutes," the second source with direct knowledge of Facebook's content moderation strategies told Motherboard.
|
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Its rival Facebook is going through a similar process of reacting to unforeseen consequences of its open platform that faces little human content moderation up front.
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Content moderation is fragmented into in-house departments, boutique firms, call centers, and micro-labor sites, all complemented by untold numbers of algorithmic and automated products.
|
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Scrutiny this year over Facebook's privacy and content moderation practices have led some people to abandon the service and the company to warn of thinning profits.
|
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Days after heavy backlash for not taking down gruesome photos of Bianca Devins' body quickly enough, Instagram still struggles to get a handle on content moderation.
|
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Facebook has plenty of reasons to be interested in the text that is accompanying videos or photos, particularly when it comes to their content moderation needs.
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For example it applies stricter hate speech rules to content moderation in a market like Germany, which passed a social media hate speech law last year.
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Dawn Lyon and I went to visit the content-moderation team, which works in an office park in Green, Ohio, five miles from the Akron airport.
|
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As the platformized web enters a new age of content moderation, YouTube has proven itself among the most reluctant of powerful actors to make judgment calls.
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First, it's possible to trace Pinterest's current positives — growing revenue, growing user base, and a decisive content moderation policy — to its central, and clear, value proposition.
|
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Cognizant, a firm that Facebook pays to moderate content on the social media platform, will cut its content moderation services next year, Facebook confirmed Thursday morning.
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Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who researches content moderation and social media, points out that humans are especially good at dissenting when necessary.
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YouTube has to run this muddled cost-benefit analysis, accounting both the long- and near-term, on every content moderation policy and enforcement decision it makes.
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As it spread beyond campus, Facebook began to use content moderation as a way to compete with the other leading social network of that era, MySpace.
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What Facebook's doing: The report touts some of the changes Facebook has made in an attempt to increase transparency and improve oversight of its content moderation.
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The company shuttered its offices in San Francisco, London, Munich and Paris, and slashed headcount from 240 to 150 and automated the processes of content moderation.
|
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While activists have pressured these companies to improve their content moderation, few groups (outside of the German government) have outright sued the platforms for their actions.
|
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However, the sheer amount of information — whether accurate, false, or just plain exaggerated — about the pandemic has placed incredible strain on these platforms' content moderation efforts.
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"These big online ecosystems need to get this stuff off their platforms, and they need to automate a certain percentage of their content moderation," Quinn said.
|
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"I'm not sure how this video was able to stream for [17] minutes," a source with direct knowledge of Facebook's content moderation strategies told the website.
|
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Rosen said the issue wasn't specifically related to coronavirus stories, and he denied a suggestion that the problem stemmed from Facebook's shifts in content moderation staff.
|
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Unitary, a startup that's developing AI to automate content moderation for "harmful content" so that humans don't have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding.
|
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Facebook has taken steps in this direction, particularly with its announcement this week about forming a board that will advise the firm regarding content moderation decisions.
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"We all recognize that content moderation online is lacking in a number of ways and that we all need to address this issue better," said Rep.
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Cognizant, the professional services company I have spent much of this year investigating over the dire conditions of its workplaces, was exiting the content moderation businesses.
|
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The company, which lawmakers have accused of following orders from Beijing to censor content, also recently announced a search for a director of content moderation policy.
|
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This despite Facebook repeatedly touting over the past two years its hiring of thousands of content moderators and its investment in artificial intelligence for content moderation.
|
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CNN Business also asked Facebook if the video had been going through any part of the content moderation process before police alerted Facebook to the video.
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But in the year since, lawmakers have had much greater exposure to technology issues through a number of hearings dedicated to privacy, content moderation and antitrust.
|
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Facebook is putting flesh on its plan to create an independent content moderation review board with the release Tuesday of a final charter for the body.
|
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YouTube has for years faced questions about its content moderation practices and how it decides what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on its platform.
|
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Now, Facebook has been subject to criticism alleging that the company enforces its content moderation policies inconsistently in a way that puts marginalized users at a disadvantage.
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There are three types of actions that can be taken to counter hate on social media and the internet more generally: legal enforcement, content moderation, and education.
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This list depicts banned words and phrases used by students at an Illinois school district that triggered Gaggle's content moderation system, according to 500 pages of emails.
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Mark Zuckerberg, the firm's chief executive, has said that in the long run the problem of content moderation will have to be solved with artificial intelligence (AI).
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A Facebook spokesperson offered a few notes: "Content moderation is still a fairly new field and no one has it entirely figured out," the company told me.
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The professional services firm Cognizant will exit the content moderation business after two Verge investigations into working conditions at sites dedicated to Facebook, the companies said today.
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And, as content moderation is becoming more automated, the TaskUs employees are spending less time in the human cesspool that attempts to flood social networks every day.
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Facebook's color-blind and tone-deaf approach to content moderation must be overhauled to adopt an intersectional model shaped by more context of who is often victimized.
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The added clarity offered today highlights the breadth and particularity with which other platforms, notably the wishy-washy Twitter, should lay out their rules about content moderation.
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Senators from both parties pushed Google to allow an independent third party to audit its content moderation and search rankings, similar to one Facebook launched last year.
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His book, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media, will be published in May 2018 by Yale University Press.
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Driving the news: Democrats have given up on their cozy relationship with Silicon Valley as major companies face controversies over privacy, content moderation and their market power.
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As part of its efforts, the EFF examined the content moderation policies of 16 platforms and app stores, including Facebook, Twitter, the Apple App Store and Instagram.
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The move is a familiar black eye for Google-owned YouTube, which frequently battles content moderation challenges and is losing market share of the digital advertising industry.
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By focusing on procedures, such oversight could avoid the appearance of imposing a political viewpoint; the review would focus on the more systemic problems of content moderation.
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"I couldn't imagine being the reviewer who had to witness that livestream in New Zealand," a source with direct knowledge of Facebook's content moderation strategies told Motherboard.
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Content moderation is typically an afterthought, and rarely gets the same sort of technological effort as the "platform" responsible for all the attention in the first place.
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Though it's been dealing with a string of content moderation scandals, not just in Europe — such as its Facebook Live being used to broadcast murder and suicide.
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But under questioning from senators, Bhatia declined to commit to not censoring content in China or to undergoing a third-party audit of its content moderation policies.
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The news highlights how content moderation issues aren't just limited to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but others that cater to specific communities as well.
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The New York Times report notes that Facebook did not respond to the government's request for better content moderation until it cut off the social network entirely.
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Content Moderation or Content Review is a term applied to content (text, images, audio, video) that a user has uploaded, published or shared on a social platform.
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Many technology firms regularly hire thousands of third-party contract workers to handle a range of duties like content moderation and review, janitorial duties and food service.
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But "shadow banning" continues to be a digital bogeyman, used to shoo away the nuances of social media platforms' increasingly complicated (and often opaque) content moderation strategies.
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A Facebook spokesperson admitted that the work can be difficult and said Facebook makes psychological support and wellness professionals available to everyone on its content moderation team.
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The Facebook CEO meeting with lawmakers as Facebook faces intense regulatory and political scrutiny over issues including antitrust, data privacy, content moderation, and its digital currency plans.
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The administration's trepidation at intervening in the content moderation processes of social media platforms is also wildly inconsistent with the president's own behavior on tech-platform oversight.
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In France, where the government has passed laws to stop the spread of misinformation on social media close to elections, officials are investigating Facebook's content moderation policies.
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Officials from the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission say the Trump administration's draft executive order forcing them to enforce content moderation standards is likely unconstitutional.
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"We look forward to hosting experts from around the world and continuing to find innovative ways to improve our content moderation and data security systems," she added.
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One idea, from Boston University law professor Danielle Citron, would revise Section 230 so the protection is conditioned on whether the companies have reasonable content moderation practices.
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EST According to a report from the Financial Times, Accenture has sent similar PTSD documents to employees in the EU contracted to provide content moderation for Facebook.
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However, as we have seen, online content moderation is a huge challenge even for the largest tech companies like Facebook and Google that can easily afford it.
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How TikTok decides who to make famous The co-founders of video startup Trash take a deep dive into the TikTok ecosystem, particularly its extensive content moderation.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the oversight board in November 2018 as the company weathered numerous scandals and criticism regarding its privacy and content moderation practices.
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By contrast, full-time employees who work on content moderation for Google search could make $1003,000 or more after being promoted, not including bonuses and stock grants.
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The false promise of extended break time in Austin is consistent with the overall picture workers have painted for me at content moderation sites around the world.
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The new rules were applied on top of general content moderation guidelines, which included bans against some political speech in China (those guidelines were updated in May).
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Instead, Facebook will continue to focus its content moderation efforts around taking down only material that "can cause real danger" while giving free reign to anything else.
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Sometimes, Facebook will launch so-called "lockdowns," in which all meetings are scrapped to focus on one urgent content moderation issue, sometimes for weeks at a time.
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And this is why, despite Facebook investing heavily in artificial intelligence and more automated means of content moderation, the company acknowledges that humans are here to stay.
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But the documents obtained by Motherboard show specific steps and strategies taken by the company to fight content moderation issues that may spike during an election season.
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These steps, along with Facebook's new plans to combat terrorism on the network using algorithms are steps in the right direction to make content moderation safer and more efficient — but there are still major questions about how the company can keep its massive platform safe and free from the worst the world has to offer, especially in light of a leak of internal documents outlining Facebook's content moderation policies last month.
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It also notes the three companies refused to tell it exactly how many people they employ to moderate content, and exactly how much they spend on content moderation.
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In late 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an ambitious plan: to create an independent oversight board that could overrule Facebook's content moderation guidelines, and even Zuckerberg himself.
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Facebook has launched a civil rights task force to monitor for election and census interference, and Google (GOOG) has hired some 10,000 employees worldwide to tackle content moderation.
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Collins is in change of various "policy, risk, and analysis issues," but his job focuses on two major questions TikTok faces right now: content moderation and data privacy.
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Executives from Facebook and other tech platforms including Google and Twitter have had to face lawmakers in recent months to defend their content moderation and distribution practices. Sen.
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There has been something of a revolution in thinking though over the past few months, as opposition to content moderation retreats in the face of repeated public outcries.
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For instance, last week, the Verge published an explosive look inside the facilities of Cognizant, a Facebook contractor that currently oversees some of the platform's content moderation efforts.
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"What I can tell you is we do content moderation for almost every major social network and it's the fastest growing part of our business today," Maddock said.
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"We cannot simply allow the Republican Party to harass tech companies into weakening content moderation policies that already fail to remove hateful, dangerous, and misleading content," Hirono said.
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Regulation around content moderation on these platforms seems to be stalled in the U.S., despite high-profile Congressional hearings on bias against conservative viewpoints on big tech platforms.
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Facebook made the data available as part of its first ever Community Standards Enforcement Report, which documents content moderation actions taken by the company between October and March.
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ByteDance has been reprimanded by the Chinese government which has seen its services given app store bans, and the company's content moderation team grown from 6,000 to 10,000.
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Facebook has begun pilot tests of new content moderation tools and policies after an external audit raised numerous issues with the company's current approach to tackling hate speech.
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In his original Wired piece, Chen quotes a media studies scholar named Sarah Roberts who believes there is a "tacit" campaign to hide the practice of content moderation.
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In May, faced with rising political pressure on multiple fronts, Facebook announced it would be adding 3,000 additional staff to its content moderation team — expanding it to 7,500.
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Pappas also said that TikTok stores data on US users within the country, and that its content moderation team for the US market is similarly based in California.
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"When people are sharing billions of things a day, even a tiny fraction is too much," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a conference call on content moderation.
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Last May, The Guardian published a leaked copy of Facebook's content moderation guidelines, which describe the company's policies for determining whether posts should be removed from the service.
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And in the case of successful, market-tested merchants of disinformation like Shriner, who amassed significant followings in times of more permissive content moderation, the damage is done.
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Facebook's fight against revenge porn is just one piece of the broader challenge technology platforms face as they grapple with scalable content moderation solutions for ugly human behavior.
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Further, another report from The Verge in June detailed the poor working conditions at Facebook's content moderation sites, which are operated by outside companies offsite of Facebook campuses.
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With greater transparency around content moderation, platforms will help ensure that marginalized voices are being protected, while those that seek to harm, harass and intimidate are quickly removed.
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It's also important for YouTube to also reassess its monetization structures, to reassess who they are reward for building followings, for them to assess their content moderation practices.
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"Content moderation is a necessary but limited solution," Kat Lo, a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine who is studying online communities and moderation, told me.
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Some companies have been forced to leave content moderation in the hands of artificial intelligence-powered algorithms while their human moderators are forced to do their jobs remotely.
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It has taken steps to allow its workforce to work remotely and locked down its offices, while shifting to rely more heavily on automated systems for content moderation.
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Zuckerberg acknowledged that some content moderation tasks can't be carried out from home, meaning Facebook will rely more heavily on artificial intelligence systems with varying degrees of accuracy.
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According to a new report from The Verge, Accenture, a company contracted by YouTube for content moderation services, is now requiring its workers to sign such a document.
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Since it was announced, its brief has expanded: in addition to resolving conflicts, the board's decisions will help Facebook develop a coherent approach to content moderation in general.
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Plus, McSherry said, new legal burdens are likely to stifle competition, as only the largest tech platforms will have the resources to comply with stringent content moderation requirements.
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Making vague references to "progress," Zuckerberg argued that more speech is an inherent good for society and assailed critics that have lambasted the company's approach to content moderation.
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Companies should limit the amount of disturbing content a worker can view during a career in content moderation, using research-based guides to dictate safe levels of exposure.
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The split of their duties made sense originally, as he sees it, but now he is determined to devote more energy to things like content moderation and policy.
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And like all content moderation jobs that involve daily exposure to violence and abuse, it has had serious and long-lasting consequences for the people doing the work.
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Facebook and other big tech companies have repeatedly made similar statements regarding foreign governments, primarily China, when arguing against broader regulatory threats involving data privacy and content moderation.
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The wider problem is Facebook has scaled so big its business is faced with a steady pipeline of tricky, controversial and at times life-threatening content moderation decisions.
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YouTube is making three significant shifts in its content moderation policies, all of which essentially make it easier to identify and remove videos on the grounds of harassment.
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Mr. Zuckerberg said much of the criticism of his company over the past 18 months — specifically regarding election security, content moderation and disinformation — had been fair and important.
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Motherboard has spent the last several months examining all aspects of Facebook's content moderation apparatus—from how the policies are created to how they are enforced and refined.
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Corynne McSherry, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that it's important to think of content moderation as a set of tools that goes beyond content takedowns.
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These people—the content moderation workers who are tasked with making the decision about what can be removed—look at what else is going on in the feed.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress that the company's artificial intelligence algorithms were getting better but that human fact-checkers were essential to the "arms race" of content moderation.
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Developing a content moderation policy is difficult and bound to anger at least some users, but the alternative can also be indulging the impulses of the lowest common denominator.
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Beyond the stuff you'd expect—work closely with law enforcement, consult terrorism experts, improve content moderation—the report confirms that Facebook is using artificial intelligence to ferret out extremism.
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Perspective isn't AI algorithms making decisions in a vacuum; the API is integrated into community-management and content-moderation interfaces to serve as an assistive tool for human moderators.
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Social networks often do make mistakes around content moderation, which they have outsourced to an army of underpaid workers who must deal with near-daily changes to community standards.
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The resources that the Dart Center and Dubberley have created are general guidelines pulled from interviews, not the result of rigorous, longitudinal studies on content moderation and secondary trauma.
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Because the commercial content moderation ecosystem is global and often contract-based, firms are frequently worried about losing a contract to a company that can prove it's more efficient.
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The BBC's latest investigation has renewed criticism over Facebook's content moderation policy, which has long been a point of contention among both free speech activists and public safety groups.
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So much of the frustration with Facebook — over its size, its power, and its decisions on content moderation — stems from the fact that its decisions can have deadly consequences.
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Below is a lightly edited excerpt of Roberts and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel's discussion about why artificial intelligence is not the solution to the content moderation problem.
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Members of Congress grilled the executive on the litany of controversies and questions the social media giant is facing, including hate speech, data privacy, diversity, content moderation, and more.
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The problems (and potential controversies) surrounding content moderation will become even more delicate when it's not just nudity that get moderated, but videos that show death in real time.
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But for all the talk about content moderation, machine learning, flag-monitoring algorithms, the problem isn't the platform, and it isn't one that can be solved by the platform.
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Just around the time that a representative from YouTube parent company Google spoke about the company's content moderation efforts, some noticed the live chat function had already been disabled.
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Tech publication Motherboard, which first reported the policy change on Wednesday, revealed that the company was maintaining the distinction last year after an investigation into its content moderation policies.
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To that end, this week both companies announced new content moderation policies that will, maybe, shield users from the unbridled harassment and hate speech we wreak on each other.
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The committee also suggested the government should consider imposing fines for content-moderation failures, and called for a review of existing legislation to ensure clarity about how it applies.
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The removal of the photo, which was flagged as inappropriate for nudity by Facebook's content moderation systems, triggered an impassioned backlash among journalists in Europe and across the world.
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In June, he introduced a bill that calls for the top internet companies to undergo external audits to vet whether their content moderation systems are free of political bias.
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The goal of most Content Moderation teams is to enforce the product's Community Standards or Terms of Service, which state what can and cannot be shared on the platform.
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Reaction: Tech industry critics say that Silicon Valley's longstanding problems with content moderation has made it harder for governments facing crises to trust them to crack down on disinformation.
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Adding more stress to the job of content moderation is the sheer amount of content posted to Facebook, as well as Facebook's unclear, ever-changing set of moderation guidelines.
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It's increasingly clear, however, that at this stage of the internet's evolution, content moderation can no longer be reduced to individual postings viewed in isolation and out of context.
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But the platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms and content moderation policies, and even false claims can create an incentive to err on the side of promoting the right.
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The startup is pursuing its own path in artificial intelligence, looking beyond the technology driving high-profile projects such as content moderation at Facebook and automated driving at Tesla.
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Debates about gun control, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, video games, mental illness, de-platforming, content moderation, and regulation all rage simultaneously on cable news, in print, and on Twitter.
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To fill the gap, Facebook is shifting more of the work to artificial intelligence, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been heralding as the future of content moderation for years.
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Content moderation and behavioral guidelines are likewise rendered in the terms of legal governance, as are their systems for dispute and recourse (as in the ubiquitous post-ban ''appeal'').
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The most recent report on Reddit content moderation puts impersonation as comprising only 2.3 percent of content policy violations of its approximately 141,123 violations (not including removals of spam).
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While tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have called for defined regulation on content moderation, it's unlikely that they'd be pleased with changes that increase their liability.
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That's why Facebook will soon outsource some of its toughest content moderation problems to a new, much-anticipated but not yet fully formed outside group: its independent oversight board.
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In late 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an ambitious plan: To create an independent oversight board that could overrule Facebook&aposs content moderation guidelines, and even Zuckerberg himself.
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Social media firms have been pilloried relentlessly over the past two-plus year over issues around illegal and harmful content, moderation failures, and the spread of misinformation and propaganda.
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This isn't Facebook changing, this is more of the same 'Facebook first' ethos which has always driven its content moderation decisions — just now with a highly polished 'overseen' sheen.
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Tech companies hesitant to implement Although hashing has been used by tech companies for years, Facebook and Google said the future of content moderation mostly lies in artificial intelligence.
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It's computationally difficult to use AI to find violence in video, in particular, said Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who researches content moderation and social media.
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"The scale makes a huge difference," said Kate Klonick, a law professor at Yale who researches the technology sector and is close to members of Pinterest's content moderation team.
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While it has taken steps to implement content moderation policies in an attempt to reduce the amount of toxic bigotry on its platform, it has mostly been lip service.
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Facebook again declined to give specifics when asked by VICE News, and instead offered a generic response regarding its content moderation — which is outsourced to CPL Resources in Dublin.
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The launch came amid concerns over Facebook's privacy and content moderation practices that have led some people to abandon the service and the company to warn of thinning profits.
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Channel 4's Dispatches TV program conducted an undercover probe of the web behemoth's content moderation efforts and found that employees allowed racist or violent posts to stay on Facebook.
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Social companies such as Facebook and YouTube have both touted their platforms' AI content-moderation features only to backtrack amid scandal and course-correct by hiring thousands of human moderators.
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In other words, to really solve the challenge of content moderation, the big social-media platforms may have to say goodbye to the business model which made them so successful.
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Among the recommendations are allowing broader reporting of hate speech, offering a similar reporting system across different social networks, and putting content moderation on par with finding bugs in code.
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Outside of somehow conflating privacy regulation and content moderation into the antitrust discussion, no other candidate who answered the question of whether to break up Big Tech endorsed Warren's plan.
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Trending up: Here's some cautious optimism for TikTok's creation of a new committee to help shape its content moderation policies, with help from the corporate law firm K&L Gates.
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The game has become yet another frontier in the ongoing battle over content moderation and appropriate lines of speech on private platforms that are now often spaces where people congregate.
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The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor.
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In other words, Apple's enforcement, which caused tech's biggest platforms to follow suit, was something of a content moderation sleight of hand — a cosmetic change rather than an actual deletion.
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His daughter also featured in clip promoting the year-end episode about content moderation, with Minhaj yelling, "Get off Facebook!" at the infant, who was sitting at a laptop. Help!
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I predict that the modest decline in users will make some of Facebook's content moderation / foreign interference problems better in 2019, while introducing new worries about its long-term business.
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He told me that in the Philippines, content moderation has become an attractive career track, and that everywhere he goes, he meets moderators who take great pride in their work.
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Despite persistent calls from civil society advocates for transparency, social media companies do not publish details of their internal content moderation guidelines; no major platform has made such guidelines public.
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The news not only signals the perseverance of parts of the North Korean's money-making enterprises, but also a slice of the content moderation issues that tech platforms constantly face.
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Twitter has tried to combat allegations of restrictiveness by taking middle-of-the-road measures on other content moderation issues, and we expect them to maintain that approach in general.
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Just one of the difficult content moderation issues embedded in the businesses of sociotechnical, planet-spanning social media platform giants like Facebook — hate speech — defies a top-down 'global' fix.
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Newer, better, more innovative platforms might never get off the ground due to liability concerns or the need to focus resources on content moderation rather than on the user experience.
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But content moderation is already a tricky proposition on the more popular Twitch, and YouTube has struggled again and again (and again) to create a safe environment for all users.
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As part of that investigation, I went to Facebook's Menlo Park, California headquarters for on-the-record interviews with the people in charge of the company's sprawling content moderation operation.
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The documents show the constantly evolving arena of content moderation, with phrases, fictional characters, or in this case, emojis, potentially taking on new meanings that platforms then have to tackle.
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That democratic approach would also apply to rules for content moderation on the site, which Gelernter believes wouldn't face the same tensions that Facebook and Twitter are currently grappling with.
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But the viral spread of the Christchurch shooting video shows the limits of the content moderation machine in the face of technologies that have been designed to be attention traps.
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It isn't uncommon for platforms to repurpose tools designed to remove spam and porn for the removal of other types of content as platforms become more sophisticated about content moderation.
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After a bug in Facebook's artificial intelligence-driven content moderation systems blocked factual news articles much of Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the problem in a call with reporters Wednesday.
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Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, urged executives at Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit to publicly report their Census-related content moderation efforts and share flagged content with partners in real-time.
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We know that content moderation leads to PTSD, but we don't know the frequency with which the condition occurs, or the roles most at risk for debilitating mental health issues.
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Right now, the company is an unenviable position, caught between two sides making conflicting demands around its policies and processes, particularly on the subjects of political advertising and content moderation.
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Where some of the richest, largest and most-resourced tech companies are failing to preemptively limit their platforms' exposure to illegal content, startups are filling in the content moderation gaps.
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The actor's business manager, Kristoffer Winters, said the app had been pummeled by so many negative comments that the team decided to enforce more content moderation on an updated version.
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But a more confident Zuckerberg appeared better prepared to take the heat, fielding questions on everything from financial regulation to content moderation to concerns over Facebook's growing power and size.
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Blackburn pointed to the bias allegations earlier this year when she set up a Senate tech task force, which is looking at issues including antitrust, data privacy and content moderation.
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Chris Gray, now a tour guide who left his content moderation job around two years ago, is suing both Facebook Ireland and CPL, the contracting company that employed him directly.
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While a higher degree of responsibility around content moderation might be a burden on social media companies themselves, it will likely have a neutral or even positive effect on brands.
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And so Facebook's content moderation team has been given a Sisyphean task: Fix the mess Facebook's worldview and business model has created, without changing the worldview or business model itself.
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The early decision to globalize Facebook's content moderation policies, and to skew toward allowing as much speech as possible, have extended to today's policies and enforcement, with much higher stakes.
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The Chinese-owned video app said in October it would invite outside experts to review some of its content moderation policies, just as Facebook and YouTube have in the past.
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He has extensively covered the process of content moderation on social media and the effect it has on the humans who have to flag that offensive content, from pornography to beheadings.
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The Menlo Park, California-based company on Thursday released the latest iteration of its Community Standards Report, which is meant to help the public understand how it is handling content moderation.
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The move is somewhat unusual in the content moderation space, where platforms typically just ban a piece of content or user rather than using the courts to try and identify them.
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In January, Project Veritas released three videos about Twitter's content-moderation practices that feature hidden camera footage of nine current and former Twitter employees—one woman and eight men, including Norai.
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Areas where he said Facebook has made the most progress vis-a-vis content moderation are around terrorism, and nudity and pornography (which he noted is not permitted on the platform).
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Sandra Wachter, a lawyer and research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, says there are also legal reasons why humans will need to be kept in the loop for content moderation.
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Particularly when the company continues to face bipartisan criticism that its content moderation decisions are "biased" — your decisions can't be biased if you refuse to make them in the first place.
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Fifth, TikTok — owned by the Chinese company ByteDance — announced it had hired and outside law firm and formed a committee to refine its content moderation guidelines and disclose them more fully.
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Since the beginning of the year, Zuckerberg has highlighted his own company's commitment to trust and content moderation by stating that it spends more on safety than Twitter's whole annual revenue.
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The sheer scale of Facebook's platform — which now has more than 2BN active users globally — contrasts awkwardly with the far smaller number of people the company employs for content moderation tasks.
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I think it's a recognition that while it's important to work on automatic content moderation, the realistic thing is we're not at the point where that's going to be catching everything.
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Calling for a "collegial approach" to regulation last November, Macron announced what he called an "unprecedented field experiment" with Zuckerberg to take French officials behind the scenes of content moderation process.
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Content moderation takes a lot of resources — human reviewers, programmers, and lawyers — and it may be harder for smaller players to keep up if the laws are applied across the board.
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As of February, Genpact employed more than 1,600 employees in its Facebook teams in Hyderabad, more than 10% of the 15,000 the social network said were working on content moderation worldwide.
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Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet Medium's head of legal Alex Feerst interviewed a bunch of people who have worked in content moderation about their experiences.
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And while the UK and France have not yet committed to applying fines as a stick to beat social media on content moderation, they are at least eyeing such measures now.
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Facebook's content moderation rules have also recently been criticized by child safety charities — so it's not just terrorism related material that tech firms are facing flak for spreading via their platforms.
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The problem, as she sees it, is that it's impossible to implement nuanced content moderation at scale; AI is simply not yet capable of distinguishing between erotic fan art and porn.
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AI will aid in a lot of areas, such as by supplementing the role of people in content moderation, which will never be enough to match the scale of the problem.
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This spring, Chandra organized a summit of around 200 leaders from content moderation sites around the world — an event he plans to hold twice a year, with another coming this fall.
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On Tuesday alone, three different Congressional committees held hearings with executives from major tech companies on issues ranging from competition to content moderation to Facebook's plan to launch a digital currency.
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The true test of this experiment in openness will be how responsive Facebook is to the feedback it gets, and how closely its aspirations for content moderation match up to reality.
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Likewise, the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month—in which 50 people were killed and 50 more were injured—have influenced the debate over content moderation.
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As Murphy lays it out, these include voter suppression tactics; accountability infrastructure; content moderation; advertising targeting; diversity and inclusion among employees; taking out bias from AI and algorithms; privacy and transparency.
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Why do automated content moderation systems, which have for years been heralded by the platforms as the chief weapon in our arsenal against offensive, extreme content, continue to fail their remit?
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Facebook's headcount has swelled 23 percent year-over-year as it's now half-way to its promise of doubling its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018.
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In May 2014, Dave Willner and Dan Kelmenson, a software engineer at Facebook, patented a 3D-modeling technology for content moderation designed around a system that resembles an industrial assembly line.
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Growing concerns over online radicalization and resurgent far-right extremism have forced many tech companies to ramp up content moderation programs, which have so far largely relied on self-reporting mechanisms.
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For years, critics have hammered Facebook over the deluge of disturbing and sometimes violent content that spills across the platform, even as the company continues to tighten its content-moderation policies.
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YouTube, and parent company Google, have yet to really roll out expansive edits, but have been embroiled in other content moderation issues and are no doubt working to curb political misinformation.
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TikTok and parent company ByteDance have been increasingly transparent about content moderation policies — especially after accusations of censoring content for the Chinese government — but details about the algorithm remain mostly unknown.
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The project then evolved into a venture-backed startup, where its use of AI to automate content moderation decisions attracted the attention of Airbnb, eventually leading to a purchase in 2018.
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Content moderation problems at YouTube have also forced the company to be less aggressive on which videos can carry advertising and the measures it takes to keep viewers on the platform.
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"Allowing hide and mute functions could provide these types of users a level of content moderation control in terms of how their profile is being presented to the world," he says.
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Like a lot of content moderation rules, this framework seems aimed at addressing specific high-profile problems on the platform, not running a scorched-Earth campaign against fake photos and video.
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Facebook's constant churn of content moderation-related problems come in many different flavors: There are failures of policy, failures of messaging, and failures to predict the darkest impulses of human nature.
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It's not just the sheer mass of the deletions and reports, but also a glance at the processes on site that reveals that content moderation is a complex challenge even for Facebook.
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Now, a colleague worked out that if you were to employ German levels of content moderation globally, it would ... I mean, it's something like half a percent of Facebook turnover or something.
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How Google's Jigsaw Is Trying to Detoxify the Internet Rob Marvin profiles Perspective, a project from the Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw that is working to build content-moderation software powered by artificial intelligence.
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Aside from TikTok's crisis management efforts, the report raises questions about how the platform's content moderation system in place that was unable to identify, or take action, on an apparent livestreamed suicide.
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Joseph Cox summarizes it for us in Vice: The report itself is split into four sections: content moderation and enforcement; advertising targeting practices; elections and census; and the civil rights accountability structure.
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These workers, who might otherwise work in content moderation, digital marketing, or in call centers for Western companies, can now also find contract work as professional trolls when campaign season heats up.
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The place he saw sounds like it was a world away from other reports of Facebook content moderation centers, such as the horrific conditions described in a recent article by the Verge.
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These tough choices, and the philosophy with which Facebook approaches them, are becoming increasingly important now that the company is in the midst of an unprecedented escalation of its content moderation efforts.
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Part of the problem, he says, is that both users and companies have got it wrong: content moderation is not a peripheral inconvenience, but "in many ways, the commodity that platforms offer".
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The piece draws new attention to the role Sheryl Sandberg has played in content moderation disputes, reporting that Facebook's chief operating officer does weigh in on difficult calls from time to time.
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The platform has also come under attack for its hosting of extremist content and its heavy-handed approach to content moderation to appease advertisers that find their products advertised alongside questionable content.
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In response to the report, the chairman of the UK House of Commons' media committee, Damian Collins, told the BBC he has "grave doubts" about the effectiveness of Facebook's content moderation systems.
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But they do point to what appear to be slow-emerging areas of focus for lawmakers in the future: more transparency for political ads, stricter enforcement mechanisms for content moderation, and more.
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It's only been a day since Tumblr announced it was banning adult content on the platform, but already its automated content moderation algorithm has been hard at work flagging nudity and porn.
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Providing more human content moderation alongside algorithmic flagging has become one of the main solutions touted by Facebook and YouTube, too, which have also become hotbeds for spreading false information after tragedies.
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In the past two years, we have seen a backlash against the tech firms for problems from privacy breaches to questionable content moderation policies that allow hate speech and worse to spread.
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Earlier this month, it announced a new team to "further increase transparency around our content moderation policies and the practices we employ to protect our community," which included two former US lawmakers.
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The report cites 11 past and current YouTube moderators who claim that big names like Logan Paul, Steven Crowder, and Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg are given more rope when receiving YouTube content moderation.
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And the 73,000 additional moderation staff announced by Zuckerberg in the wake of another content moderation scandal represents a tiny drop in the ocean for a platform with nearly two billion users.
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"There are legitimate questions regarding the company's policies and practices, including with respect to content moderation and the protection of user data privacy," said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York.
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Although AI can help content moderation move faster, the technology can also struggle to understand the social context for posts or videos and, as a result make inaccurate judgments about their meaning.
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In some cases, streamers may also be motivated by growing dissatisfaction with the way Twitch enforces its content moderation policies, even as they risk losing fan bases that took years to build.
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But while its competitors were giving grandiose speeches and supplicating at the White House, the company's content-moderation choices stood out as an example of a social network with a moral compass.
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On Friday I published a report confirming what had been obvious to anyone who spends much time talking to people who work in content moderation: the job causes post-traumatic stress disorder.
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If content moderation felt like the entry point to a career rather than a cul-de-sac, it would be a much better bargain for workers putting their health on the line.
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Facebook may indeed be much bigger than Twitter, but budget is not the only reason the two companies' approaches to content moderation, such as policing hate speech and harassment, are drastically different.
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It protects Facebook from making content moderation decisions that might drag it into a contentious presidential election in 2020 — and from taking all kinds of heat from all sides for doing so.
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The Verge has some select audio clips if you want to hear Zuck in his own voice, including more on Facebook's challenges with content moderation and pressure from other apps like TikTok.
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"Facebook has had to build out this massive apparatus for content moderation so quickly, their priority has been getting as many bodies in place as quickly as possible," Gillespie told BuzzFeed News.
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And it is part of a much broader effort by Facebook to develop a global infrastructure that can police — or validate — content moderation efforts by other social media platforms, not just Facebook.
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Reports have also surfaced citing TikTok employees saying that the app's content-moderation decisions were made by China-based teams that demoted or removed content touching on U.S. social and political topics.
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Content moderation by social media companies is therefore an important part of the solution: it does not require legislation and therefore does not open the doors to unjustified restrictions on freedom of expression.
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This isn't the first time Pinterest has led the way in terms of bold content moderation — back in February, I wrote about it's decision to stop returning results for searches related to vaccinations.
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This connection has been met with scrutiny, by people as far up as US government officials, over how much access and influence the Chinese government has to TikTok's user data and content moderation.
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Exclusive: The Harvard professor behind Facebook's oversight board defends its role Mark Sullivan interviews Noah Feldman, who helped to come up with the idea of Facebook's forthcoming independent oversight board for content moderation.
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Maintaining real-time content moderation would require 24,000 people working every hour of the day, at a cost of $8.6 million per day or $3.1 billion per year (assuming a $15 hourly wage).
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And yet given what we know about the difficulties of content moderation at scale, it's difficult to understand how the regulations now in development will achieve their aims without significantly undermining political speech.
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Facebook's bottom line: The company could enjoy lower operational costs and risk since it will no longer have to invest in as many content moderation efforts on an encryption-based platform, Sara said.
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Note also that the news comes ahead of yet more hearings in the United States Congress on September 5th about content moderation, in which we can expect Myanmar to come up more once.
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This includes looming antitrust investigations, free-speech and political bias complaints, calls to revoke tech platforms' legal protections, demands for independent audits of search results and content moderation, and even charges of treason.
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But while Facebook has been increasingly allowing executives and high-ranking members of its content moderation policy teams to explain the decisions it makes and the challenges it is facing, YouTube has not.
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Machine learning and artificial intelligence already powers a deceptively wide sweep of crucial processes and tools like facial recognition, self-driving cars, ad targeting, customer service, content moderation, policing, hiring, and even war.
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"The tech we already have can do a vastly better job, but there is just no incentive for companies to deploy it for content moderation," Kalev Leetaru tells me in an email conversation.
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The company recommended shareholders reject each of the seven proposals brought by investors that call for it to provide more information around gender pay disparity, environmental impact policies, content moderation and other issues.
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Its Hong Kong content moderation team is partly based in mainland China but is moving to Hong Kong, and it will follow the same rules that the company sets everywhere else, TikTok said.
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Last month Motherboard published an extensive investigation into Facebook's content moderation strategies, relying on leaked documents and nearly two dozens interviews, which found that the company's approaches are sophisticated but have significant holes.
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Content moderation should be more transparent, and platforms should be more accountable, not only for what traverses their system but the ways in which they are complicit in its production, circulation, and impact.
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A series of investigations published by The Verge and the Tampa Bay Times earlier this year uncovered the brutal working conditions that Cognizant employees faced at content moderation centers in Tampa and Phoenix.
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As it stands, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — known as tech's legal shield — websites largely are not liable for their content moderation decisions and what users post on their platforms.
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As it stands, under Section 2628 of the Communications Decency Act -- known as tech's legal shield -- websites largely are not liable for their content moderation decisions and what users post on their platforms.
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Do you think you've set a fair goal for your policy team to create a single, coherent content moderation policy that covers beauty influencers, tech YouTubers, and how-to channels, and political comedians?
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The situation also highlights ongoing confusion over how and when social media companies enforce their content moderation policies, which sets the stage for incidents like this to be blown out of proportion. Victory!!!
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" No wonder content moderation on the big platforms doesn't so much resemble an unpleasant visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles as it does a re-enactment of the horror film "The Purge.
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Josh Hawley (R-MO): "Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols," Hawley said in a statement.
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The report, which arrived weeks after it tapped a group of corporate lawyers to review its content moderation policy, is widely seen as the short video app's effort to placate the U.S. government.
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However, TikTok's burgeoning popularity in the US has also raised questions regarding its roots in China, and how much access and influence the Chinese government has to TikTok's user data and content moderation.
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It will then work to increase its transparency around content moderation and continue to build out a deeper bench of internal leaders in order to tackle the challenges caused by its rapid expansion.
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Facebook on Tuesday released the charter for an oversight board that it is creating to review its content moderation decisions amid blowback over how it handles issues like hate speech and political content.
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Zuckerberg would be the lord of engineering—what Facebook built—and Sandberg would be in charge of everything Zuckerberg wasn't interested in, including sales, policy, legal, content moderation, and, eventually, much of security.
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"Content moderation is really hard — and these are really consequential decisions about public discourse and human rights," said Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School researching the regulation of online speech.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first wrote about his conception of a new body to govern the company in November of 2018 as Facebook faced mounting scrutiny over its privacy and content moderation practices.
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President Donald Trump and other Republicans have also accused companies like Facebook and Twitter of building an anti-conservative bias into their content moderation decisions, a claim for which there's no clear evidence.
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Representatives from Twitter, Google and Facebook all fiercely defended the legislation, saying it helps them monitor dangerous content and encourages competition in the sector by protecting smaller players with fewer content moderation resources.
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While TikTok has mostly gained a reputation as a musically focused video-based social media app popular with young people, it has a massive audience which makes these content moderation policies especially worrying.
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Experts on the panel, like Boston University School of Law professor Danielle Citron, suggested tying the liability shield to companies' demonstrating "reasonable" content moderation rather than giving it to tech companies for free.
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It also argued that internet companies should be given flexibility in order to experiment with content moderation technology, a likely reference to the AI tools Facebook uses to flag and block harmful content.
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Ms. Blackwell, also a researcher at Facebook, had been toying with the idea of applying the principles of the restorative justice movement to online content moderation (you can listen to their episode here).
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Ms. Blackwell, also a researcher at Facebook, had been toying with the idea of applying the principles of the restorative justice movement to online content moderation (you can listen to their episode here).
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Germany introduced its own law at the beginning of this year to tackle disinformation The United States has a more difficult time when it comes to regulation over content moderation than its European counterparts.
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If the UK does implement fines similar to the ones Germany has targeting hate speech, smaller companies would theoretically be hurt more by infringements because they don't have the same resources for content moderation.
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Facebook confirmed to VICE News that it had removed some of the content flagged by Avaaz, and said that it had Assamese speakers among its content moderation team, though did not say how many.
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Platform problems include the issues endemic to corporations that grow audiences of billions of users, apply a light layer of content moderation, and allow the most popular content to spread virally using algorithmic recommendations.
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According to SZ, Facebook has outsourced content moderation in Germany to a company called Arvato, and the work has taken a toll on those responsible for removing hate speech, child pornography, and fake news.
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Facebook's content moderation flexibility appears to be lost on Jones, who also criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Monday for "shadow banning" his outlet, positioning himself as the victim of a Silicon Valley censorship plot.
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"Let's be honest, this flare-up on Logan Paul is going to die out eventually," Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who has been studying content moderation for seven years, told BuzzFeed News.
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Be smart: Snapchat has been able to dodge a lot of the scrutiny that its peers have experienced over the past two years by focusing on user privacy and content moderation from the start.
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A story published in Wired last year explained some of the details of Instagram's machine learning comment filters, but it's well-established that this sort of technology is no silver bullet for content moderation.
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The company's official position on content moderation remains political neutrality, a spokeswoman told me in an email: Google is committed to free expression — supporting the free flow of ideas is core to our mission.
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Still, there's a lot of work to be done: Leveraging information available there can be difficult for small and medium sized companies that don't have the resources to build their own content moderation systems.
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They all engage in content moderation but are not obligated to; they do it largely out of sight of public scrutiny and are held to no official standards as to how they do so.
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Regardless, the companies have made some strides in terms of improving their content moderation policies and making these efforts more transparent, which may help stave off the momentum of calls to alter Section 230.
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But TikTok, which has been ramping up its content moderation and government affairs teams over the past six months, has not offered as much insight into its data practices or views on human rights.
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The Rifkins told me they haven't had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests' upload capabilities.
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There are several reasons why this may be the case, but a Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the company's automated system isn't enough when it comes to the holy grail of content moderation: understanding context.
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When it comes to content moderation, these companies have also resisted any modifications to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being held liable for the content their users post.
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" After 12 hours of silence, GIPHY responded the next morning, telling us "After investigation of the incident, this sticker was available due to a bug in our content moderation filters specifically affecting GIF stickers.
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These smaller sites have already faced difficult problems with content moderation, and would be even less likely to spend resources on cleaning up after their users if doing so might lead to a lawsuit.
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No one knows for sure if the content moderation systems that Facebook, Twitter, and Google use show exactly the same biases in these studies; the technology these companies use to moderate content is proprietary.
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Baran, who reviewed the document for The Verge, said it read as "reverse psychology" — getting workers to blame themselves for any mental health struggles they have as a result of working in content moderation.
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We look forward to continuing our work with Facebook to ensure that the platform's content moderation guidelines and trainings properly support the updated policy and are informed by civil rights and racial justice organizations.
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According to five people who attended the series of off-the-record dinners at Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto, California, the conversation largely centered around the most important problem plaguing the company: content moderation.
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The decision was formally made at Facebook's Content Standards Forum on Tuesday, a meeting that includes representatives from a range of different Facebook departments in which content moderation policies are discussed and ultimately adopted.
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How Zuckerberg responded: The day after the Times' story ran, Zuckerberg held a conference call with reporters to discuss Facebook's content moderation efforts, but ended up taking a lot of questions about the story.
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Someone has deliberated over whether the image adheres to the platform's Community Guidelines, meaning real people—known as "commercial content moderation" workers—make decisions to determine whether your boob selfie is too boob-y.
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In any case ... But they veer into idiocy and real problematic, appalling content too, which YouTube has ... They have had a lot of problems of late ... but they've always had problems with content moderation.
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Google creates external advisory board to monitor it for unethical AI use Here's a move somewhat reminiscent of — although far less ambitious than — Facebook's plan to create an independent review board for content moderation decisions.
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In countries such as Myanmar, a lack of content moderation to scale in the country's native language let hate speech go largely unabated, fueling an ethnic genocide and misinformation spread by Myanmar's own government officials.
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This makes sense; unlike rival social networks like Facebook and Twitter, whose content moderation strategies have been heavily scrutinized, most popular subreddits are managed by volunteer moderation teams who work in tandem with Reddit administrators.
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In this new documentary from the film group Field of Vision, the leader of a session on content moderation asks a simple question: when you open Facebook, you don't, as a rule, see pornography. Why?
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However, TikTok's burgeoning popularity in the US has also raised questions about its ties to the Chinese government, and how much access and influence the Chinese government has to TikTok's user data and content moderation.
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Big Tech's liability shield under fire yet again from Republicans Here's a new Republican bill that seeks to eliminate all content moderation on the web that goes beyond what is legal under the First Amendment.
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The Trump administration has also taken a strong stance against Big Tech's content moderation, inviting dozens of right-wing pundits and media figures to the White House to discuss this alleged bias earlier this month.
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Since the American presidential election of 2016 and the Brexit referendum, controversies over fake news, hate speech and online harassment have forced internet companies to bring content moderation into the light—up to a point.
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What they're doing: Axios attended a content moderation meeting last month at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters, where the company began considering rules to reduce or even take down manipulated media that is presented as true.
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Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) released a proposal to strip large web platforms of their immunity against lawsuits for user-generated content if the Federal Trade Commission judges that their content moderation practices aren't politically neutral.
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If it can strip down to just the most efficient business model and essential content moderation staff, it might be able to become a sustainable long-term business rather than relying on skittish venture funding.
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In addition to pulling back the curtain on content moderation, Facebook will also make it possible for people to appeal bans on individual posts; previously they'd been able to do so only for entire Pages.
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These issues over content moderation, of course, aren't limited to asinine challenges, and the ensuing damage control when the Google subsidiary does run into more serious issues often plays out before us in real time.
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That same month, Facebook faced renewed criticism over its content moderation efforts when a Facebook Live video that appeared to show a gunman massacring worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, threatened to spiral out of control.
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But while tech companies have been quick to try to use AI engineering solution to fix content moderation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has said that context remains a hard problem for AI to solve.
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At the end of last year YouTube said it would be increasing its content moderation and other enforcement staff to 10,000 in 2018, as it sought to get on top of all the content criticism.
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The tricky part of content moderation is not identifying content, he says, but the "long, hard conversations" — conducted by humans, not machines — necessary for reaching the tough decisions about what constitutes personal or political speech.
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A UK parliamentary committee recently slammed tech giants including Facebook for taking a laissez-faire attitude to content moderation, for example — and suggested the government should look at implementing fines for failures on this front.
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In mid-August, Facebook said it was making progress in Myanmar by adding more Burmese speakers and changing its content-moderation policies to make it easier to report bad conduct and root out hate speech.
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Photo: GettyContent creators have a lot of complaints about YouTube, but one you'll hear most often is how the platform seems to give its high-profile accounts more leniency when it comes to content moderation.
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The Verge's Casey Newton, who first reported on the working conditions of Facebook's content moderators in February, took a deep dive at the daily lives of workers at another content moderation site in Tampa, Florida.
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It will also force Facebook to be a little more transparent about its content moderation rule-making, since it will have to publish explanations for why it does or doesn't adopt the policy change recommendations.
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But given Dropbox has come under less scrutiny for its content moderation and impact on society, two issues constantly facing Zuckerberg and Facebook, he may have less to add on the topics than Desmond-Hellmann.
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Scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators on social media companies' content moderation policies increased significantly around 2016 because of election interference as well as allegations of anti-conservative bias coming from President Trump and his allies.
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It may be the most explicit acknowledgment yet from a content moderation company that the job now being done by tens of thousands of people around the world can come with severe mental health consequences.
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Companies will "answer questions on their content moderation practices and how they can be better stewards of free speech in the United States and abroad," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte said in a statement.
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Those testimonies marked the beginning of an era of intense tech scrutiny by lawmakers, who have held multiple hearings with Facebook and its peers over the past year about user privacy, content moderation and competition.
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According to a new book by Wired's Steven Levy, CEO Mark Zuckerberg now plans to take a more active role in aspects of the business that were formerly Sandberg's domain, like policy and content moderation.
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Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Jeff DenhamJeffrey (Jeff) John DenhamChina's TikTok turns to former lawmakers to help with content moderation policies Hillicon Valley: Warren turns up heat in battle with Facebook | Instagram unveils new data privacy feature | Advocacy group seeks funding to write about Big Tech TikTok adds former lawmakers to help develop content moderation policies MORE (R-Calif.) as part of a team from the law firm K&L Gates that will help develop a detailed content-vetting protocol, according to the publication.
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It's having a raging debate about sex and content moderation, Elizabeth Minkel reports: Across the web, platforms and their users are grappling with what digital speech shouldbe protected and the potential links between rhetoric and action.
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As social media companies have grown and the issue of content moderation has loomed ever larger, some parts of these firms have leaned towards developing more machine-based, automated systems for detecting or flagging individual content.
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Facebook certainly doesn't want mass shooting videos on its site right now, but content moderation at scale is inherently hard, even for companies smaller than Facebook — and adding more legal liability won't change that basic problem.
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What they're saying: "It's common for a bounty to be paid for reporting code issues to a company — companies should do the same with content moderation," Newhouse School of Public Communications professor Jennifer Grygiel tells Axios.
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A wedding blog Clarifai used to work with used its product to automate content moderation, and the human editors who'd formerly been in charge of approving images were moved to working on more qualitative tagging tasks.
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In the face of rising political pressure and a series of content-related scandals, both Google and Facebook last year announced they would be beefing up their content moderation teams by thousands of extra staff apiece.
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But pressure from the EU to pay more attention to the data practices of big firms is forcing the U.S. to take notice about all sorts of issues around big tech, from privacy to content moderation.
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The harder political reality for Facebook is that pressure from the outcry over its current content moderation failures will force it to employ a lot more humans to clean up its act in the short term.
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The company answered its critics, put Mark Zuckerberg on the phone with reporters for an extended question-and-answer session, and moved to shift the conversation to some important moves it is making around content moderation.
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That's not a completely fair comparison: Instagram has the luxury of tapping into Facebook resources like data centers, content moderation teams and advertising technology — things that its competitors have to build and support on their own.
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More broadly, the bill could effectively require companies to vet all content before it's posted, rather than after, which would dramatically raise the costs of content moderation and force major changes to these companies' business models.
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But it also seems we are too eager to blame all things on content moderation, and to expect platforms to display a perfectly honed moral outlook every time we are troubled by something we find there.
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In an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, Mark Zuckerberg says he is exploring the option for Facebook users to independently appeal to the content moderation team if their content gets taken down for violating community policies.
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The committee plans to follow up with Facebook to "address significant gaps" in the company's answers as it continues to investigate its data privacy practices, as well as issues around propaganda, election ads, and content moderation.
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Tech companies also need to make their content moderation training materials publicly available so anti-hate advocates and the public can make sure the trainings accurately reflect what we need to feel safe on these platforms.
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Steam, despite absolutely fumbling on what should be obvious content moderation issues and ignoring the presence of hate groups on its platform, was an early platform to seriously attempt to address the problem of review-bombing.
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The lawsuit does not currently include specific details about Scola's job and instead relies on news investigations about how content moderation works; Scola's lawyers told Motherboard that further into the legal process she will detail them.
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Though Live Action was apparently banned on Pinterest months ago, it's in the news now because right-wing activist organization Project Veritas reported Tuesday that it was labeled as "porn" by Pinterest's internal content moderation systems.
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While content moderation should be a priority for online platforms, particularly given the rise in online extremism O'Rourke references, the kind of across-the-board accountability would discourage companies from allowing users to post at all.
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But the rest of the board have continued to support Zuckerberg, who has accepted blame for failing to emphasize safety earlier and warned of the current profit slowdown as Facebook invests in security and content moderation.
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Although Susan Wojcicki is CEO of the Google-owned video service, she reports to Pichai, and ultimately, he is responsible for the content moderation challenges that go with being home to billions of hours of video.
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The good news is that later this year, Facebook will launch its independent Oversight Board: a Supreme Court for content moderation that will allow users to appeal in cases like the activists' and the Iranian citizens'.
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The company addressed those issues starting in mid-2018 following repeated scandals, causing growth in expenses to surge to more than 100% for several quarters as it hired new privacy staff and invested in content moderation.
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An open protocol will make content moderation even harder by moving much of the network permanently out of Twitter&aposs reach — a design choice that may expose the company to unprecedented scrutiny from lawmakers and critics.
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It seems clearly designed to prevent Facebook from making content moderation decisions that put it at the heart of the presidential campaign in 2020 — and taking all kinds of heat from all sides for doing so.
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What they're saying: In a blog post, TikTok said it has taken steps to assure independent decision-making, including basing its content moderation team in the U.S. and storing all U.S. user data outside of China.
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For all the flak that Facebook gets about its content moderation, the people who are actually working on policy every day very clearly stress about getting the specifics right, and the company has had some successes.
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I mean, do you see this as this is the way that people growing up now are going to watch videos going forward, even if YouTube continues to play fast and loose with its content moderation?
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Llanso said getting more transparency from platforms about their content moderation practices, including the numbers and scope of the material there that's being flagged and is being taken down, could help shape policy prescriptions as well.
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With all the content moderation, it's unlikely you'll discover your kids doing anything crazy online, so Amazon views these new features as a way to help parents connect with their kids in the world outside the tablet.
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In a phone call with Motherboard, EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression, Jillian York said that she believes the undercurrent of content moderation on social media is the censorship or restriction of speech towards marginalized groups.
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Hell, our sample size of ~100 reviewers at the Content Moderation Summit couldn't agree on anything, so it's not clear how many people you'd actually need, but it's at least double the 200,000 employees we'd already mentioned.
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Facebook is pivoting to private messaging, but there the problem of content moderation will be even worse — it's harder to stop a digital communications campaign spurring ethnic cleansing when you can't even see the messages being exchanged.
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The Guardian has published details of Facebook's content moderation guidelines covering controversial issues such as violence, hate speech and self-harm culled from more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that the newspaper has seen.
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Though some of the company's content moderation decisions have clear rationales — removing child pornography, for example — many of those it faces are similar its fake Zuckerberg picture problem: dilemmas with no easy answers and potentially fraught consequences.
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Under the proposed law, companies like Facebook and Twitter would be required to obtain a government certification that they are not making politically biased decisions about content moderation, in exchange for liability protections they currently receive automatically.
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On this episode of Recode Decode, former deputy CTO of the United States Nicole Wong talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the future of tech policy and why content moderation is more complicated than many people think.
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Since Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet's YouTube have all been vocal (to various degrees) about staffing up the human element of their content moderation teams, here are a few things to understand about how these systems typically work.
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While Facebook is right to invest in AI to make content moderation less horrible, it has utterly failed to be transparent about the working conditions and psychological toll the job takes on the people who do it.
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Zuckerberg denied to answer specific questions about the scale of the bug, but said he believes a similar bug in the future will be unlikely, even as Facebook's content moderation workforce makes adjustments to working from home.
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Google has also increasingly been facing political pressure as President Donald Trump lobs unfounded accusations about anti-conservative bias and censorship, and Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have "grilled" the company about their content moderation practices.
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Regardless, it&aposs possible that more transparent processes around content moderation will provide some measure of comfort to certain stakeholders in and of itself, like brands or critics looking for insight into Facebook&aposs otherwise opaque process.
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Focusing on recommendation algorithms could help Dorsey deflect some of the content moderation problems the company continues to face, such as its failure to curb hate speech, said Jennifer Grygiel, a social media professor at Syracuse University.
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Facebook on Tuesday unveiled its proposed bylaws for the company's oversight board — a sort of "supreme court" that can theoretically overturn content moderation decisions — but it's filled with loopholes and binds Facebook to very little concrete action.
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It remains unclear to me whether applying a more localized set of approaches to content moderation means that American users will be able to post content that Chinese users cannot on their own version of the app.
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Zuckerberg has been repeatedly grilled by the media and Congress on the subject of content moderation, fake news, and disinformation campaigns, and this constant attention has led Zuckerberg and Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg to become increasingly involved.
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"Viacom and some of these larger companies have a lot of bandwidth to sue, and have put a lot of energy into protecting their copyrights," says Kate Klonick, a lawyer at Yale who studies private platform content moderation.
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READ: Facebook in India is drowning in anti-Muslim hate speech Facebook has been criticized for its over-reliance on artificial intelligence in content moderation, relying on human moderators only when a report is flagged by a user.
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Driving the news: Instead, Wednesday's hearing focused on Facebook's handling of discrimination and civil rights and its lack of diversity, its role in elections, free speech and content moderation, monopolistic behavior, anonymity, terrorism, child sexual abuse, and more.
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In my interviews with workers at a content moderation site in Phoenix, I heard over and over again how the work environment was full of people who had come to believe the fringe views that they were reviewing.
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A widely cited tweet thread by YouTube video maker Dan Olson claimed that Patreon's single-tier business model should be easy to scale since it doesn't require massive data hosting resources or even a lot of content moderation.
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"This summer, we are empowering our official Club community managers with proactive content moderation features that will help create safe spaces for fans to discuss their favorite games," Microsoft's executive vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, said Monday.
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The upshot of Facebook carrying out retrospective content moderation from afar, relying on a tiny number of reviewers (relative to its total users), is that the company is failing to respond to human rights risks as it should.
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Well, Facebook's own content moderation guidelines misidentified the provenance of a crucial image, Joseph Cox reports: From Alex Jones to Russian troll factories to Iranian influence operations, Facebook is increasingly facing pressure to deal with its disinformation problem.
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YouTube also is speeding up the launch of a new classification tool that can detect and remove twice as many individual comments as in the past — accelerating the automation of content moderation (which could, itself, have unintended consequences).
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The gunman, who was part of attacks that killed 49 people in New Zealand, broadcast live footage on Facebook of the attack on one of the mosques, leading to calls for more content moderation by the social network.
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" Google said in a written statement submitted to the committee that it works to ensure "our products serve users of all viewpoints and remain politically neutral" but it acknowledged that "sometimes our content moderation systems do make mistakes.
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The human labor involved in carrying out content moderation across Facebook's 2 billion-plus user mega-platform is ethically horrifying because the people who Facebook contracts for after-the-fact moderation necessarily live neck deep in its cesspit.
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As it attempts to navigate over 350 million users and 43 languages, the platform will no doubt experience additional scandals and backlash, no matter how much it pushes to occupy the middle ground on issues of content moderation.
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"If you take this out of the Backpage context, what you're really talking about is content moderation practices that all user-generated content websites use, or have the ability to use under our current legal framework," she said.
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And it codifies the idea of using Section 230 immunity—without which no online platform could realistically risk hosting user-generated content at scale—as a cudgel to force private businesses to adopt government-approved content moderation practices.
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"We look forward to working closely with Vanessa and the rest of the US team to strengthen content moderation guidelines and implementation while helping to maintain TikTok's distinctive creative and fun environment," Denham told Politico in a statement.
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Now, it's hoping to change that with the formation of a new committee of experts who will help TikTok craft its content moderation policies and increase transparency around these topics and others that afflict popular social media platforms.
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Over the last year, these companies have grown into particularly powerful arbiters of speech -- with Twitter suspending accounts, YouTube closing channels, and Facebook shutting down inauthentic accounts and crafting content moderation rules to curb hate speech and misinformation.
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Hawley, a member of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, characterized his meeting with Zuckerberg as "a frank discussion" where he also brought up concerns about Facebook's content moderation, which Hawley has accused of being tainted with bias against conservatives.
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I'm by no means a content moderation expert, but I do think that they should have some kind of system where things are being reviewed on a regular basis, if you reach a certain threshold on your channel.
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" Google said in a written statement submitted to the committee that it works to ensure "our products serve users of all viewpoints and remain politically neutral" but it acknowledged that "sometimes our content moderation systems do make mistakes.
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In a recent interview at Facebook headquarters, one senior company employee told Motherboard that Facebook somewhat formalized the process of responding to content moderation-related inquiries from journalists, and has a dedicated system for 'escalating' issues highlighted by journalists.
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"I'm by no means a content moderation expert, but I do think they should have some kind of system where things are being reviewed on a regular basis if you reach a certain threshold on your channels," she said.
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In a highly critical report looking at the spread of hate, abuse and extremism on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, a UK parliamentary committee has suggested the government looks at imposing fines on social media forms for content moderation failures.
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One might think it wise to hold off on bragging about the "tremendous scale" the building's auditorium offers while Facebook opines that it's just really difficult to scale-up content moderation operations in Myanmar in order to prevent genocide.
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Even in the US, where it was founded, the company has been largely opaque about its rules and how it implements them, and it's repeatedly punted when asked to do more content moderation or flag misinformation on the platform.
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Removing content that promotes doubt in election results is not a viable approach, both because content moderation is a slippery slope, and because there are places around the world where allegations of outright vote-rigging are all too credible.
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On the call, Zuckerberg sounded stoic, noting that the company recently doubled the size of its security and content moderation team to 20,000 and is better prepared to deal with the misinformation campaigns that plagued the 2016 election season.
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After all, arguably Facebook's biggest problem when it comes to content moderation decisions is not how it's making the decisions or who's making them, but just how many decisions there are to make on a platform of its size.
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From consumer privacy protections and content moderation to antitrust enforcement, the European Union has introduced a host of new rules aimed at Silicon Valley's biggest companies, and at the business practices that enabled them to amass so much power.
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Add to that, as these internal moderation guidelines show, Facebook's own position in apparently wanting to balance openness/free expression with "safety" is inherently contradictory — and invites exactly the sorts of problems it's running into with content moderation controversies.
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In a story by Casey Newton in The Verge, former workers at Facebook's Tampa content moderation center, operated by subcontractor Cognizant, described filthy working conditions, long shifts involving exposure to graphic and violent content, indifferent management and other problems.
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While the government distanced itself from involvement, the state-run mobile operator's concern focused around Netflix's ability to run violent and adult content without adhering to content moderation regulations in the country, which has the world's largest Muslim population.
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Specifically, they plan to ask about how content moderation policies are made, enforced and monitored; how users are informed of these things; how "creators of fabricated content" are detected; and how users may appeal or otherwise affect these policies.
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Tech industry trade groups focused on the political neutrality aspect of the bill, arguing that this would make content moderation harder, not easier, as the companies would be open to lawsuits from users who believed they were being censored.
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Without assuming regulatory oversight of a government body, a blue-ribbon panel of regulators, experts, academics, and activists could be given access to platforms and their data to oversee content moderation, without revealing platforms' inner workings to the public.
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Minds currently has a content moderation team of "about five" people, Ottman said, and their job is to go through the report queue and mark flagged posts as being not safe for work (NSFW), or ban the offending account.
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A glitch in Facebook's content moderation tools exposed its moderators' personal profiles to members suspected of having ties to radicalism and terror, potentially putting the moderators at risk and causing one to upend his life in fear of retaliation.
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The Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act would require "big tech companies" to submit to external audits conducted by the Federal Trade Commission to prove their algorithms and content moderation practices are not biased against either U.S. political party.
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Section 230's valuable protections allow content moderation decisions and liability protection not only for social media, but also for information resources like Wikipedia, review sites like Yelp, and even the comment sections of personal blogs or news sites.
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According to Fischbach, his Discord chat, and Markiplier fans on the popular subreddit "r/markiplier," YouTube's automated content moderation system began banning users from their YouTube and Google accounts for "spamming," an apparent infringement of YouTube's terms and services.
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Cox told NBC News he wanted to encourage content moderation, while acknowledging that it would be impossible for tech companies to review everything users put online the way traditional publishers — who are subject to defamation laws, for example — do.
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"I am working with TikTok because they've shown that they take content moderation seriously, are open to feedback and understand the importance of this area both for their community and for the future of healthy public discourse," she added.
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Much of the content moderation discussion we're seeing now came to a head last May when a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi distorted to make her appear drunk circulated across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
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Technology's being developed to try to understand and decode the actual sentiment behind words, but for the time being, the best way to go about the Sisyphean task of content moderation are still good ol' fashioned human content mods.
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It's impossible to imagine Facebook actively supporting Oversight Board members being selected from among the pool of content moderation contractors it already pays to stop humanity shutting its business down in sheer horror at what's bubbling up the pipe.
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These smaller entities might lack the resources they once had for security and content moderation, and they would have to generate revenue on their own because they would no longer be subsidized by the revenues of their parent companies.
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The company, reportedly valued at $75 billion, has increased its lobbying prowess in the U.S., bringing on outside experts and even a former member of Congress to help with its lobbying efforts and with crafting its content moderation policies.
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Over the past year, Facebook has been forced to expand its content moderation practices in response to human and civil rights groups, who have argued that the company is not doing enough to protect its marginalized users from hate speech.
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The CDT said in an email to Motherboard that content moderation at scale is a difficult job, and the a flawed appeals process is an unfortunate side effect of an effort to get hate speech and platform abuse under control.
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While the tech executives predictably balked at having their businesses broken into pieces, many did agree that regulation is needed to tackle a host of issues, including data privacy, content moderation and facial recognition services, such as Amazon's Rekognition tool.
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In May, the UK's Home Affairs Committee also urged the government to consider a regime of fines for social media content moderation failures — accusing tech giants of taking a "laissez-faire approach" to moderating hate speech content on their platforms.
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Earlier this summer, John Oliver called Facebook "History's Most Profitable Data-Harvesting Machine," which was charitable compared to Sunday night's 20-minute takedown on the company's hate speech policies and content moderation, especially in countries that are newly getting online.
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Just to highlight a few of the good issues on the table, the white paper blessedly brings the conversation back to privacy and data ownership—something that seems to have been lost as the conversation has turned to content moderation.
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But its content moderation structure is very different from the top social media platforms like Facebook and Google, which rely on a mixture of artificial intelligence and human content moderators to enforce top-down rules against hate speech, harassment and more.
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As I wrote earlier this year: Platform problems include the issues endemic to corporations that grow audiences of billions of users, apply a light layer of content moderation, and allow the most popular content to spread virally using algorithmic recommendations.
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Facebook Moderation and the Unforeseen Consequences of Scale Designer Ana Noemi has a thoughtful reflection on my piece about content moderation: Facebook could make structural platform shifts which would reduce the likelihood of disturbing content showing up in the first place.
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While Europe is moving the ball forward on copyright and content filtering laws, the U.S. has just served the major platforms a major win when it comes to content moderation through the new USMCA trade deal, which would replace NAFTA.
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"Not just Facebook, but all mainstream social media platforms' practices are under scrutiny in a way that they never have been before," Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA who's been studying content moderation for seven years, told BuzzFeed News.
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Last month Facebook faced similar accusations over its content moderation system, after a BBC investigation looked at how the site responded to reports of child exploitation imagery, and also found the site failed to remove the vast majority of reported imagery.
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It's quietly been building an advertising business that has gotten write-ups in Advertising Age and AdWeek, as well as a profile of its artificial intelligence content moderation tool, but has remained mum about the new direction the company is taking.
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According to the report: inconsistent application of content moderation guidelines; opaque explanations around their policies; underplaying the scope of the problem; slow response times; and a reactionary posture that can seem more attuned to public perception than addressing root-level problems.
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While Giphy allows users to upload their own GIFs and GIF stickers to the massive library of over 2 billion quick, animated clips, the site has content moderation filters in place to detect any uploads that violate its user guidelines.
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Facebook got the Last Week Tonight treatment Sunday night, with host John Oliver slamming the company for its business model, its content moderation, its recently released apology ads, and Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality trip to a disaster-stricken Puerto Rico.
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YouTube deleted tens of thousands of videos from its platform following the attacks and removed human review from its usual content moderation process in order to more quickly take down violent content related to the massacre, according to a spokesperson.
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It also recommends Facebook launch an early warning system within its Strategic Response team, again based on human content moderation — and do so for all regions where the UN has warned of the rise of hate speech on social media.
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One line of questioning targeted Facebook's content-moderation practices, which rely on contracted workers who have complained of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological effects of policing the most horrific content uploaded by users: murders, suicides, hate speech, and more.
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Silicon Valley's growing body of critics say that those structures have insulated the industry from proper oversight and led to the increased scrutiny from regulators around the world concerned about tech giants' market power, handling of user data and content moderation.
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"This legislation would force private companies rather than the courts to become the judges of what is illegal in Germany," he said, adding that Facebook's partner Arvato would employ up to 700 staff in Berlin for "content moderation" by year's end.
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TikTok has since beefed up its D.C. policy shop and camp of advisers, and just this week announced it's opening a "transparency center" in California to give experts insight into how the company approaches content moderation, data privacy and related issues.
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In a statement about its content moderation provided to BuzzFeed News in January, a Tencent spokesperson said the app takes action against bogus information by marking content as false, taking down posts, or blocking accounts that publish disinformation temporarily or permanently.
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Content moderation: Twitter now has nearly 1,500 employees focused on moderation and responding to content reports, who are now spread across 9 locations around the world (up from 2 locations a year ago, according to Twitter Service vice president Donald Hicks).
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"We will start to see the traces, which are so often hidden, of human intervention," says Sarah T. Roberts, an information studies professor at UCLA and the author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.
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The issue at Facebook serves as a reminder that any type of automated system can still screw up, and that fact might become more apparent as more companies, including Twitter and YouTube, depend on automated content moderation during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Twitter says it isn't coming out with any new tools to discover manipulated or synthetic media but instead continuing its existing process — which largely relies on users to find and report tweets that may violate the company's content moderation policies.
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Chinese-owned social media company TikTok has hired two former members of Congress to help develop content-moderation policies in hopes of avoiding the criticisms encountered by bigger firms like Facebook and Twitter, the company announced Tuesday in a blog post.
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After her own mother was diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer, the woman dropped out of school until her mom passed away and is currently a squatter in her sister's house doing content moderation at the world's most popular search engine.
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"I feel it is becoming increasingly apparent that Reddit, with its voluntary content moderation system, is unable to respond adequately to the sharing of potentially dangerous health misinformation without significant reform in their moderation strategy," said the former r/Coronavirus moderator.
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Several months after we published an investigation about Facebook's content moderation practices, the Times published its own article about the same topic, running some of the same internal Facebook documents we had already published, without acknowledging we had done so.
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In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates (myself included) drafted the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation—a concrete attempt at pushing companies, including Facebook, to provide greater insight to users and the public.
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"Section 230 is critically important to the Internet ecosystem and enables startups and web platforms to engage in content moderation without fear of liability," Evan Engstrom, the executive director of the startup advocacy group Engine, said in a statement last week.
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Here's your content-moderation-is-hard story for the day: A human content moderator flagged Fynnpire's work for "strong profanity used in a hateful or derogatory way" after hearing him said the word "car" and thinking it was another c-word.
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While the new policy doesn't encompass the totality of harmful body image posts on a platform filled with unattainable standards, and still relies on users to do the heavy lifting of content moderation, it's a step in the right direction.
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Washington, DC (CNN Business)Facebook will soon name the first members of a new oversight board designed to hold the platform more accountable in its content moderation decisions, the company said Tuesday as it released a charter governing the fledgling institution.
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It also shows that content moderation—an already difficult task of anticipating and creating a policy for every possible social situation—is monumentally more difficult when you're building it into your platform after it's been adopted by over 2 billion people.
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An August investigation by Motherboard gets a shout-out in the piece, as Oliver references one of Facebook's many internal content moderation rules—in this case, one that specifies the very specific instances in which photoshopped anuses are allowed on the site.
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I like the idea of the board, which promises to devolve power over speech and content moderation to a more diverse group of subject matter experts, who are less tethered to the politics of one country or the financial interests of the platform.
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Potier said the team had just visited Facebook's content moderation center for Southern Europe, which a Facebook official told BuzzFeed News is run by an Austrian contractor called CCC out of a facility in Barcelona and managed from a Facebook office in Dublin.
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So one of the things that I've been seeing as a trend more recently is the fact that there are entirely new pockets of what I consider to be commercial content moderation work that have opened up that may go by another name.
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Facebook says it's working on an improved compliance and audit process for the third-party contractors it hires to perform content moderation, following an exposé by The Verge detailing harrowing working conditions at the Phoenix, Arizona facility of a Facebook contractor called Cognizant.
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Inside Facebook Decisions on Subscriptions, Content Policing ($) This is basically two (good!) Reed Albergotti stories about Facebook stacked on top of one another — one about the notion of an ad-free Facebook subsidized by users, and one about why Facebook outsources content moderation.
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BENGALURU/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook contractor Genpact has raised minimum wages for the content moderation teams it runs for the Silicon Valley firm in India, the latest sign of improvement for workers after reports of stressful conditions at the social network's sites globally.
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"They should be very thankful for the work that you guys do, but at the same time it draws attention to the commercial content moderation labor force that's hidden that itself is a whole other dark side of the attention economy," he said.
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Our thought bubble: Tech executives are getting a free pass when they head to Capitol Hill because they often find themselves defending their companies against unproven accusations of bias, instead of being pressed to discuss real, proven and persistent problems around content moderation.
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There's a lot of things we've got to talk about, everything from election issues to content moderation to what these companies are doing to the legislation that's maybe coming for these tech companies — probably not, because Congress is a bunch of idiots.
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In 2019, it said it plans to address censorship and discrimination in its content moderation; and it's also working on a "Civil Rights Accountability Infrastructure," in which civil rights are put front and center in the development of new products and policies.
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In a wide-ranging exploration of working conditions at Facebook's content moderation facility in Arizona, which is operated by a vendor called Cognizant, The Verge described an office where employees cope with intense stress by using drugs and having sex at work.
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In a story published by The New York Times today, YouTube said it took down a total of 8.28 million videos in 2017, with about 80 percent of those takedowns having started with a flag from its artificial intelligence-powered content moderation system.
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And rather than applying sophisticated tools like image recognition to content moderation, companies should be making those tools available to users, so that they can filter out any content they'd rather not see, be it naked bodies or, say, pictures of snakes.
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We get ... Can I just tell you on this topic some of the funniest, most memorable moments I have at Glassdoor are the content moderation meetings that we have where we get together like every couple months to revise the rules. Right.
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The Facebook CEO is visiting US lawmakers in a series of meetings and dinners this week, as the company faces intense political and regulatory scrutiny on issues ranging from antitrust to data privacy, content moderation, and Libra, its controversial digital-currency plan.
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The balance is precarious, and most paths forward for content moderation are a minefield of unintended consequences — just ask Facebook, Twitter and Google, who have been made to grapple with once seemingly innocuous choices that have brought us to where we are today.
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It's driving home for a lot of people who don't necessarily follow tech the way that we do that the internet platforms are the primary battlegrounds of the culture wars, and that content moderation is going to be at the heart of it.
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They use that phrase a lot when they're talking about online content moderation when in reality, a tech company is not beholden to a citizen the same way that a state or a government is in terms of protecting the freedom of speech.
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It is debatable as to whether historic positive sentiment about Facebook was a result of the company being noncommittal, rather than a failure by broader society to appreciate the negative externalities caused by Facebook&aposs deficient approach to content moderation and data security.
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For the first time, a tech giant is seeking to give some of its power back to the people — in this case, in the form of an independent 40-member board that will serve as a kind of Supreme Court for content moderation.
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Indeed, on a press call, Facebook made this bias toward leaving things up explicit: The limited ambit of operations to start is "due to the way our existing content moderation system works, and in line with Facebook's commitment to free expression" (emphasis added).
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The bloc already showed how its broad privacy regulations could shape a global debate — and now tech companies are growing concerned any new effort to regulate artificial intelligence or content moderation could have far-reaching effects on their way of doing business.
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Because it's harder for lower-salaried employees to get by in the Bay Area, some tech companies have outsourced large portions of their workforce in functions like content moderation and customer support to places where salaries — and rent — are cheaper, like Phoenix, Arizona.
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Because it's not just ... It's content moderation, which is married to hate speech, which is married to people feeling depressed, it's creating mental issues around our society, which is linked to addiction, which is linked to election ... It's all part of a larger spin. Yeah.
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This month UK MPs also called for the government to consider a similar approach there, to try to enforce better standards of content moderation on social platform giants — with signs some US lawmakers might be thinking along similar lines too, vis-a-vis terrorism content.
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Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn't yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and "Jack, ban the Nazis" has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's tweets.
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Roland Heintze, head of social media consultancy Faktenkontor, noted that Facebook had invited German media to tour its content moderation offices in what he sees as part of a broader campaign to improve its image, be it over hate speech, privacy or its tax affairs.
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Two, Zuckerberg's answer — which is basically that too much content is hosted on Facebook for the company to apply any level of nuance to individual comments — speaks to how the challenge of content moderation has overwhelmed the company despite a massive investment in contracted moderators.
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Laura Murphy, the former ACLU staffer hired to do the audit, said in the report that she will "explore various approaches to content moderation as well as measures for addressing censorship and harmful and potentially discriminating content on the platform" in the coming year.
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It comes amid a rising tide of criticism of Facebook by groups in countries such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka over the platform's content moderation policies, which critics say have been too lenient with accounts that seek to spread violence and attack minority groups.
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Last month, a UK parliamentary committee urged the government to look at financial penalties for social media companies that fail on content moderation — hitting out at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for taking a "laissez-faire approach" to moderating hate speech content on their platforms.
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Now, YouTube will likely throw even more resources at its content moderation problem and communicate its strategy even more loudly to the public — something it has already begun to do — in an effort to outpace any regulation that might come down on the platform.
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Today, a coalition of nonprofit groups tried to address that gap with a list of basic moderation standards called the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, designed as a set of minimum standards for how to treat user content online.
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Blaming the video's removal on technology is a notable change from previous instances, like the removal of a widely shared post displaying solidarity in the wake of the Orlando shooting, when Facebook said the posts were removed "in error" by its content moderation team.
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Responding to many questions about the speed of their reaction and the continued availability of the shooting video, several companies published posts or gave interviews that revealed new information about their content moderation efforts and capacity to respond to such a high-profile incident.
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If it's expensive and resource-intensive to run good, autonomous content moderation systems, and doing so will deprive Facebook and Instagram of engagement, then it's not hard to see why the platforms would continue to drag their feet in upgrading the tech and attendant policy.
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The company has sought to beef up its lobbying efforts and grow its U.S. content moderation team, but the criticism of Tiktok only intensified Tuesday when lawmakers ripped the company for declining to send a representative to a hearing on tech companies' ties with China.
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Dyball declined to pinpoint any particular policies that the association plans to push for or against, but its record on issues like data privacy and content moderation in the United States suggests firm opposition to any regulation internet giants perceive to be heavy-handed.
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Repeal is unlikely: Republicans and Democrats also agreed they don't want to gut or repeal Section 230, but they warned Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and Google global head of intellectual property policy Katherine Oyama that companies need to step up their online content moderation efforts.
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In response, the companies defended their record, saying that they had made it more difficult to buy such false interactions across their platforms, and that they had invested, collectively, millions of dollars in new technology and content moderation tools to thwart the worst offenders.
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After more than two years of scrutiny around Facebook and its content-moderation efforts, the anarchy within the official user help forums illustrates how entire categories of dangerous content are still slipping through the cracks and threatening the social network&aposs 2 billion users.
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