Opinion: Controlling the spread of insidious content online is extremely difficult—but combining efforts across platforms raises serious threats to free expression.
"Not even against the rules"
But as the New York AG report makes clear, the returns on that public-pressure approach have diminished ever since. For one thing, there’s no longer a single, theoretical “public” that acts in concert on anything … much less on issues of content moderation. For another, the platforms still hosting content like the video of the Buffalo massacre, after years of opposition, are either well-insulated from outside persuasion or economically/ideologically motivated to buck whatever norms mainstream sites establish.
The politics of ‘platforms’
Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.
Facebook content management controversies
Facebook and Meta Platforms have been criticized for their management of various content on posts, photos and entire groups and profiles. This includes but is not limited to allowing violent content, including content related to war crimes, and not limiting the spread of fake news and COVID-19 misinformation on their platform, as well as allowing incitement of violence against multiple groups.
The Decentralized Web: Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? — MIT Digital Currency Initiative
In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content
Meta’s content moderation policies and systems have increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook in the wake of the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.
Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web
Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.
Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web
Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.
Online Safety Bills Are Fueling a New Wave of Internet Censorship
State and federal bills seek to limit minors’ access to social media, but civil liberties advocates warn that the resulting online censorship threatens constitutional rights without delivering real safety.
The secret rules of the internet
The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.
The secret rules of the internet
The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
Censorship by Facebook
Facebook has been involved in multiple controversies involving censorship of content, removing or omitting information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.
interfluidity » Consensus not censorship
We’ve become obsessed over the past few years with the problem of misinformation. And for good reason. “Flood the zone with shit” is now standard operating procedure for a variety of interests and factions. Groups who pretend to be above that kind of thing let confirmation bias do the same work, elevating conjectures they find convenient to believe far beyond the evidentiary basis for believing them, and transmuting concurrence among prestigious groups whose biases are aligned into “authority” to which they demand deferrence. Casual information consumers become divided into two camps, the “do your own research” types who imagine, mistakenly, that they are capable of seeing through all this (and so succumb to their own confirmation bias), and those who more accurately understand that they cannot reliably distinguish truth from bullshit (and so opt out of democratic deliberation with a shrug, other than perhaps to vote for the candidates whose political party they distrust less).
Symposium: A Skeptical View of Information Fiduciaries
In recent years, the concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on platform regulation. In a forthcoming essay, we question the wisdom of applying a fiduciary framework to dominant digital platforms.
