Content Moderation Knowledge Sharing Shouldn't Be A Backdoor To Cross-Platform Censorship

Content Moderation Knowledge Sharing Shouldn't Be A Backdoor To Cross-Platform Censorship

4 years ago
Anonymous $qOHwDUKgAF

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200820/08564545152/content-moderation-knowledge-sharing-shouldnt-be-backdoor-to-cross-platform-censorship.shtml

Ten thousand moderators at YouTube. Fifteen thousand moderators at Facebook. Billions of users, millions of decisions a day. These are the kinds of numbers that dominate most discussions of content moderation today. But we should also be talking about 10, 5, or even 1: the numbers of moderators at sites like Automattic (Wordpress), Pinterest, Medium, and JustPasteIt—sites that host millions of user-generated posts but have far fewer resources than the social media giants.

There are a plethora of smaller services on the web that host videos, images, blogs, discussion fora, product reviews, comments sections, and private file storage. And they face many of the same difficult decisions about the user-generated content (UGC) they host, be it removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), fighting terrorist abuse of their services, addressing hate speech and harassment, or responding to allegations of copyright infringement. While they may not see the same scale of abuse that Facebook or YouTube does, they also have vastly smaller teams. Even Twitter, often spoken of in the same breath as a “social media giant,” has an order of magnitude fewer moderators at around 1,500.