CompuServe had some interesting differences from nearly any section of the internet today. For various reasons, people were charged by the hour, which meant they were charged by the minute to use it. So in the back of one’s mind was always a question of whether this extra minute was worth it.
So I think it tended to make people more conscious of how online they were, even if they found it compelling.
I don’t mean to portray this as a better world. I’m just saying it was a different one.
I’m very interested in ways to see how people can gather with a sense of shared ownership rather than a corporate patron overseeing the conversation."
#SocialMedia#Facebook#ContentModeration#HateSpeech: "A series of advertisements dehumanizing and calling for violence against Palestinians, intended to test Facebook’s content moderation standards, were all approved by the social network, according to materials shared with The Intercept.
The submitted ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, included flagrant violations of policies for Facebook and its parent company Meta. Some contained violent content directly calling for the murder of Palestinian civilians, like ads demanding a “holocaust for the Palestinians” and to wipe out “Gazan women and children and the elderly.” Other posts, like those describing kids from Gaza as “future terrorists” and a reference to “Arab pigs,” contained dehumanizing language.
“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people,” Nadim Nashif, founder of the Palestinian social media research and advocacy group 7amleh, which submitted the test ads, told The Intercept. “Throughout this crisis, we have seen a continued pattern of Meta’s clear bias and discrimination against Palestinians.”" https://theintercept.com/2023/11/21/facebook-ad-israel-palestine-violence/
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Algorithms#AI#Disinformation: "We need to clean up our online platforms. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research, advocacy, and policy organization working to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation, has called for the adoption of its STAR Framework (Safety by Design, Transparency, Accountability, and Responsibility). This would ensure that digital products and services are safe before they are launched; increase transparency around algorithms, rule enforcement, and advertising; and work to hold companies both accountable to democratic and independent bodies, and responsible for omissions and actions that lead to harm. The EU’s Digital Services Act is a step in the right direction of regulation, including provisions to ensure that independent researchers can monitor social network platforms. However, these provisions will take years to be actionable. The UK’s Online Safety Bill—slowly making its way through the policy process—could also help, but again, these provisions will take time to implement. Until then, the transition from social media to AI-mediated information means that, in 2024, a new digital dark age will likely begin."
#FactChecking#ContentModeration#SocialMedia#Journalism: "In this article, we chart the conflicting standards of fact-checking outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries that shifted their focus from holding politicians to account to acting as content moderators. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalog the pressures they face and their struggle with tasks that are increasingly different from the journalistic values underpinning the practice. We find that fact-checkers have to balance the number of checks across each side of the partisan divide, an exercise in “bothsidesism” to manage the expectations of partisan social media users; that they increasingly prioritize the checking of viral content; and that Meta’s third-party fact-checking program prevents them from holding local politicians to account. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for content moderation outside WEIRD countries." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448231213942
In a scathing 51-page report, the organization documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company exhibited “six key patterns of undue censorship” of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians, including the taking down of posts, stories and comments; disabling accounts; restricting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts; and “shadow banning”, where the visibility and reach of a person’s material is significantly reduced, according to HRW.
Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said."
#SocialMedia#Facebook#Meta#Kenya#ContentModeration: "For the past eight months, Nathan Nkunzimana has been making a living by selling packaged water from a stall in Lavington, a residential suburb of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. He runs his business from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday, offering doorstep deliveries for orders worth over 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($6.52). This routine is a big shift for Nkunzimana, who had worked as a content moderator at Sama — Meta’s former moderation partner in Africa — for two years until April 2023.
At Sama, the 34-year-old sat at a desk inside an air-conditioned office for up to nine hours a day, reviewing posts on Instagram and Facebook, and deleting content that violated the platforms’ guidelines.
In April, Sama decided to discontinue content moderation work and did not renew the contracts of its 249 moderators, including Nkunzimana. “The company promised us heaven and earth when we were employed, but all of a sudden, we got laid off. It’s been frustrating,” he told Rest of World.
Besides running his packaged-water shop, Nkunzimana has spent the last eight months organizing his former colleagues to get Sama to reinstate their jobs."
#EU#DSA#SocialMedia#Twitter#ContentModeration: "While the EU executive has sent requests to other systemic platforms for information on how they comply with the DSA obligations in the past weeks, this infringement proceeding is the first enforcement action under the new law.
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who in several instances in the past made public statements assuming the role of the digital regulator, announced the action precisely on X and mentioned three areas of investigation.
These areas include a suspected breach of obligations to counter illegal content and disinformation, a suspected breach of transparency obligations and a suspected deceptive design of the user interface."
#AI#GemerativeAI#LLMs#ContentModeration: "The AI development community is increasingly making use of hosting intermediaries such as Hugging Face that provide easy access to user-uploaded models and training data. These model marketplaces lower technical deployment barriers for hundreds of thousands of users, yet can be used in numerous potentially harmful and illegal ways. In this article, we argue that AI models, which can both `contain' content and be open-ended tools, present one of the trickiest platform governance challenges seen to date. We provide case studies of several incidents across three illustrative platforms --- Hugging Face, GitHub and Civitai --- to examine how model marketplaces moderate models. Building on this analysis, we outline important (and yet nevertheless limited) practices that industry has been developing to respond to moderation demands: licensing, access and use restrictions, automated content moderation, and open policy development. While the policy challenge at hand is a considerable one, we conclude with some ideas as to how platforms could better mobilize resources to act as a careful, fair, and proportionate regulatory access point."
#AI#ContentModeration#AdTech#Recommendation#Automation#News#Media#Journalism: "Automated systems and processes are a common feature of the news and media environment. This report introduces four key examples: search, recommendation, automated content moderation and curation, and advertising technology (AdTech). We provide a basic explanation of how these systems work at the technical level and show how they operate in context, drawing on examples and case studies across news and media. We then map emerging challenges associated with the use of each technology across the news and media environment, drawing on peer-reviewed research from multiple disciplines. The findings and outcomes of current research in this area from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are featured throughout. We end by identifying several critical areas where future work is needed to help ensure the safe and responsible deployment of automated systems across news and media."
Since Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack, Facebook and Instagram users have reported widespread deletions of their content, translations inserting the word “terrorist” into Palestinian Instagram profiles, and suppressed hashtags. Instagram comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji have also been hidden, according to 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights group that formally collaborates with Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, on regional speech issues.
Numerous users have reported to 7amleh that their comments were moved to the bottom of the comments section and require a click to display. Many of the remarks have something in common: “It often seemed to coincide with having a Palestinian flag in the comment,” 7amleh’s U.S. national organizer Eric Sype told The Intercept."
#EU#Algorithms#AI#AIAct#SocialMedia#Surveillance#ContentModeration: "These successes are small compared to the energy deployed to build and deploy automated systems in Europe. Our most significant setback probably occurred on 13 September, when the president of the European Commission said in her state of the Union address that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”. The sentence may be innocuous in itself. However, it reveals that the ideology that considers AI might become godlike has permeated the highest echelons of political power. One of the problems of this ideology is that it disregards the current, actual risks and failures of automated systems, making it much harder to find solutions and help people affected.
How do we go forward in such an environment? The chances that algorithmic systems will strengthen justice, democracy, and sustainability (AlgorithmWatch’s mission) in 2024 are slim. I do not expect PimEyes to remove the pictures it has of me. And I do not expect top politicians to stop using a social network where algorithms automatically favor far-right extremists."
#EU#EMFA#MediaFreedomAct#PressFreedom#DigitalRights#ContentModeration: "Millions of EU users trust that online platforms will take care of content that violates community standards. But contrary to concerns raised by EFF and other civil society groups, Article 17 of the EMFA enforces a 24-hour content moderation exemption for media, effectively making platforms host content by force.
This “must carry” rule prevents large online platforms like X or Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, from removing or flagging media content that breaches community guidelines. If the deal becomes law, it could undermine equality of speech, fuel disinformation, and threaten marginalized groups. It also poses important concerns about government interference in editorial decisions.
Imagine signing up to a social media platform committed to removing hate speech, only to find that EU regulations prevent platforms from taking any action against it."
#SocialMedia#BigTech#SiliconValley#USA#ContentModeration#Censorship: "It should be no surprise that federal politicians favor Big Tech. Silicon Valley is where the money is. Just as important, voters have not penalized politicians for failing in their duty to protect the public interest. There has been no outcry about politicians whose family members work in Big Tech and staff members whose salaries are paid by owners of Big Tech. Politicians at the state level have passed some tech reform legislation, with California leading the way, but industry lobbying has taken the teeth out of most of the laws.
In court, internet platforms have avoided unfavorable judgments by asserting rights to free speech, as well as the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. While there have historically been limits on 1st Amendment protection for harmful speech, courts have not applied any limit to the speech of internet platforms. Section 230, which was created to enable internet platforms to moderate harmful speech online, has been interpreted by courts as blanket immunity, even in cases of negligence.
#SocialMedia#Instagram#TikTok#ContentModeration: "This study examines how de-platforming and flagging assemble to replicate offline inequalities, making content creators at the margins vulnerable to both online abuse and censorship on Instagram and TikTok. Highlighting gaps in online harms literature surrounding the misuse of this functionality, this paper frames misused or malicious flagging as online abuse through interviews with users who believed they were de-platformed this way, showcasing this practice’s emotional and financial impact on targets and creating a framework to identify it through users’ gossip."
The letterwent moderately viral on the platform and has caused a wider mess for the company on Twitter and elsewhere. TikTok stated that 404 Media’s video was “Removed for: ‘Violent Extremism.’”
Here is the video that TikTok deleted, which is still up on Instagram Reels, and which had about 120,000 views on TikTok last I checked, about an hour ago:"
#Australia#SocialMedia#X#Twitter#Disinformation#Misinformation#ContentModeration: "X [formerly know as Twitter] has been kicked out of Australia’s voluntary misinformation and disinformation code, after failing to respond to a complaint about shutting down channels for users to report misinformation, during the voice to parliament referendum.
The industry association, the Digital Industry Group (Digi), announced on Monday that its disinformation and misinformation independent complaints subcommittee found X had “committed a serious breach of the code and has refused to cooperate with Digi”.
Platforms critic group Reset Australia had complained to Digi in early October about X removing a function that had been in place since 2021, allowing users to report tweets as misinformation or disinformation for investigation by X staff. Reset Australia argued that removing the function represented a breach of the misinformation code."
#SocialMedia#Palestine#Gaza#ContentModeration#Censorship: "Palestinians have long fought private censorship, so what we are seeing now is not particularly new. But it is growing at a time when online speech protections are sorely needed. We call on companies to clarify their rules, including any specific changes that have been made in relation to the ongoing war, and to stop the knee jerk reaction to treat posts expressing support for Palestinians—or notifying users of peaceful demonstrations, or documenting violence and the loss of loved ones—as incitement and to follow their own existing standards to ensure that moderation remains fair and unbiased.
Platforms should also follow the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation notify users when, how, and why their content has been actioned, and give them the opportunity to appeal. We know Israel has worked directly with Facebook, requesting and garnering removal of content it deemed incitement to violence, suppressing posts by Palestinians about human rights abuses during May 2021 demonstrations that turned violent." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/platforms-must-stop-unjustified-takedowns-posts-and-about-palestinians
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#HateSpeech: "New media studies invested in online political conflict, radical and antagonistic subcultures have taken an interest in the affordances that shape memes, vernaculars and online political communication. One often overlooked affordance is the ensemble of social, communication, platform and legal frameworks stipulating what users can and cannot say, which I call “speech affordances.” To explore this concept, I look at the strategic communication of 4chan, Twitter and YouTube subcultures tied to a historical meme, “Kekistan,” often perceived as a key example of the ideological cacophony of the 2015–2017 online “culture wars.” I focus on how 4chan's policy of user anonymity, YouTube's unmoderated comment sections and Twitter's more proactive moderation practices brought some influencers to alter the original connotations of the meme into “overt” messages tolerable to Twitter and YouTube out-groups and platform moderation policies. Speech affordances bear methodological implications for historical studies of speech moderation and the overall mechanisms in which problematic language adapts to spaces with distinct speech norms."
#EU#France#Terrorism#SocialMedia#Censorship#ContentModeration#DigitalRights: "On 8 November 2023, a coalition of six organisations – La Quadrature du Net (LQDN), Access Now, ARTICLE 19, European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Wikimedia France – filed a complaint before the French supreme administrative court, the Conseil d’État, against the French decree implementing the Regulation on addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online (also known as “TERREG”).
They are asking the Conseil d’État to request a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the validity of the TERREG in light of fundamental rights protected by EU law."
#EU#Ireland#DublinRiots#DSA#BigTech#ContentModeration#SocialMedia: "Under the DSA, tech firms also have to provide data to law enforcement authorities if requested, so they can track who is posting the content even if they’re anonymous (typically IP addresses are captured or metadata is available).
In some cases, police forces will ask tech platforms to leave potentially illegal content in place so they can establish a proper chain of evidence.
However, part of the three-and four-way discussions in the 24 hours following the riots looked at one particular issue: the lack of Irish-speaking content moderators working for X, TikTok and Google/YouTube." https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2023/1203/1419689-riots-eu/
#BigTech#StartUps#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#AI#Outsourcing: "Still, the cost of these cuts is arguably already evident in the way major platforms have scrambled to respond to the war between Israel and Hamas. And the shift away from in-house trust and safety teams has created an opening for consultancies and startups to offer something new: trust and safety as a service.
These companies, many of them founded and staffed by people with Big Tech pedigrees, let platforms “buy rather than build” trust and safety services, says Talha Baig, a former Meta engineer whose startup, Sero AI, recently received backing from accelerator Y Combinator. “There is a lot more labor out on the marketplace, and there’s also a lot more customers willing to buy that labor.”
But experts warn that outsourcing trust and safety also means outsourcing responsibilities to teams with no power to change the way platforms actually work."
#SocialMedia#HateSpeech#ContentModeration#Racism#Israel#Palestine#Gaza: "Social media companies must urgently address the fanning of online hate and racism against Palestinian and Jewish communities, Amnesty International said today, as the conflict in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories escalates further.
The organization has found an alarming rise in advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to violence, hostility, and discrimination on social media platforms, which is prohibited under international human rights law, and other harmful content against Palestinian and Jewish people. Amnesty International also documented concerning reports that content posted by Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian rights are being subject to potentially discriminatory content moderation by different social media platforms."
A formal meeting with Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as soon as possible and no later than the end of 2023, to discuss Meta’s censorship of Palestinian voices;
Ensuring that Meta’s newsworthiness allowance applies to news content related to the ongoing hostilities;
Immediately addressing the over-enforcement of its content moderation policies and eliminate bias in relation to Arabic-language content; and
Full transparency on both legal and voluntary requests made to Meta by the Israeli government, its Cyber Unit, and other governmental actors, and referral units."