The challenges of global content moderation
The difficulty of moderating the ocean of content that gets posted on social networks by billions of users every day was obvious even before former President Donald Trump’s trolling forced Facebook and other platforms to block his accounts earlier this year . Differentiating genuine harassment or abuse from friendly banter, identifying harmful images and videos from among the tens of millions uploaded every day , and distinguishing between authentic political messages and professional trolling operations is hard enough just for English-speaking audiences in North America; these challenges are compounded when different languages and cultural norms are involved . What sounds like innocuous phrasing when translated into English could be dangerous hate speech in another language or culture, and automated systems—and even human moderators—are often not good at making those distinctions.
There are political challenges as well. Authoritarian regimes have become expert in navigating the terms of service for the major platforms, and using them to flag content they don’t agree with; some countries have used problematic content such as “fake news” as an excuse to legislate the truth . How are the digital platforms handling these challenges? And what are the potential downsides of their failure to do so? To answer these and related questions, we convened a virtual panel discussion using CJR’s Galley platform , with a group of experts in content moderation and internet governance and policy around the world.
