What is content moderation and what role does it play?
“Social Media Monopoly” by clasesdeperiodismo is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
As the world grows out of control with digital networks, the safety and health of the online environment become ambiguous, and online harassment and violence become increasingly complex issues. Having content moderation in place to monitor and review platform operations and content is an effective approach for both platforms and users. Content moderation can help platforms filter out harmful content such as violence, porn, bullying, harassment, and copyright infringement to create space for meaningful content (Jhaver et al., 2018). Behind this, every party related to the Internet: users, platforms and governments will be the beneficial parties who not only enjoy the benefits brought to them by the Internet but also should have the obligation and right to control the release of those violent and sexual content to guard the online community for the whole population.
Who should be responsible for the content?
Individual
Individuals, as users, enjoy the convenience brought by the platform and should set an example by reporting to the platform when they see violence, pornography and other inappropriate content. With the advancement of technology, the public is no longer just the receiver of information, but can also become the sender. Whenever there is a network, each person can publish content on the public platform, however, this content gradually becomes uncontrolled. Some users take up public resources to display malicious content and let it spread freely in the network. The network is a special carrier that maps the state of the whole society and the thoughts of the public (Velásquez et al., 2021). While the dissemination of malicious content frustrated the efforts of the platform’s creative team, to provide the public with faster access to information and entertainment. Moreover, when nobody stops this from happening, children and parents will pay the price for these inactions. Many websites are already reaching into children’s pockets to get high click-through rates to make money.
“Toca Tea Party” by Toca Boca is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
During Covid-19, most families decided not to leave the house for the safety of their children, replacing them with only games on their electronics and having to go to online classes. Just when parents thought they were isolated from everything dangerous, pornography ads on kids’ video games hit their children. These ads appear in games labelled as appropriate for 10-year-olds and are so graphic and violent that it puts both parents and children in a difficult position. Since adults do not blame the website when their children become victims, it can cost each person a heavy price. Although sex education for children is necessary, it is still important to stop it from appearing as a small advertisement to children’s eyes. At this point, everyone can post more correctly oriented and educational content on the platform, to get more awareness of what bullying and harassment are.
However, it will encounter the difficulty, that not all individuals are willing to cooperate, and there will be no policy to enforce it; everyone has freedom of speech. Hence, everyone can protect themselves and their families by simply moving their fingers to spread positive things than exposing those around them to avoidable harm.
Social media platform
“Timorese Government Launches Campaign to End Gender Violence” by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In the process the public is overly attached to online media, allowing those platforms to become organic. Stealing users’ information to sell for money; posting inaccurate information on the platform to attract clicks and topics; inserting explicit adult ads and leaking users’ privacy at will. As a medium, social media platforms should balance public interest and individual interest. Because of the special nature of online social media, users are not able to observe other persons’ psychological states and verify the truthfulness of statements through reality (Guidry et al., 2021). Furthermore, the failure of platforms to regulate online violence and privacy leaks has caused irreversible harm to users. When a 2014 incident involving “users posting nude photos of celebrities on Reddit” became a sensation, Reddit did not decide to take immediate action to stop the spread of the photos but instead allowed them to be widely reposted. As the situation grew more serious, the Reddit platform was pressured by public opinion to publish an article to justify themselves. In such a high-profile and urgent matter, the normal response would have been to control the spread of the photos and shut down the publisher’s account. Instead, Reddit internally felt that they should not interfere with user content and only removed the offending photos when it was discovered that persons in the photos were still underage, Reddit shuts down subreddit tied to nude photos in ‘celebgate’ attack. Eventually, the platform compromised for their benefit, not caring about the emotions and self-esteem of the victims. To better balance public and individual interests, the platform should:
- Remove illegal content
- Ensure that users have a pleasant experience on the platform
- Filter ads that are appropriate for the audience
- Maintain users’ intellectual copyrights
Additionally, these contents have limitations. The website is the current mainstream platform, and inevitably various small websites go unethical for the sake of profit. It is also hard to fully moderate and supervise the content, as well as respond to the users’ demand for “freedom of speech”.
Government
“Google got a new PR department” by surrealpenguin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
The government, as a member of the beneficiary party of content moderation, they have to do the maximum to defend the public interest and protect individuals from the attacks of the Internet and unfair rules of the platform. According to the survey, users’ information is permanently stored in a “digital dossier” while they use the Internet, even without ever being checked by the authorities. The “digital dossier” helps to investigate some private information such as background, credit, and hobbies (Solove, 2004). If the government does not moderate these practices, it will pose a serious threat to public privacy as the Internet grows. However, “Why Google Quit China-and Why It’s Heading Back” has become a successful case of the government intervening to moderate platforms. “Google”, one of the three giants of the Internet, chose to abandon the Chinese market in 2010. China has a large population base and a large Internet gap at the time. But despite this, China was thorough in its moderation of platform content. The platforms in the past did not focus on content censorship, and most of the users were from European and American countries, where there is more freedom, but when Google came to China, they found China to be extremely oppressive. The government protects the interests of the public by creating “geopolitics”. China does not tolerate foreign platforms making content in their country that violates local laws. Such content moderation has the benefit of reducing hacker attacks, and harassment by violent content, and controlling the spread of negative content that causes unnecessary mass panic.
Even though, content moderation appears to be the best tactic to defend the interest of the public with the support of policies, it has to be admitted that it can affect the political friendly relations between countries. The Internet is supposed to be a place where freedom is pursued, and over-intervention by the state can lead to the loss of users of the platform and the inability of users to achieve freedom of speech.
The Internet is something that everyone has a right to enjoy, and we should cherish it more. Individuals, platforms, and countries all should take responsibility for the negative content that already exists on their platforms. The Internet will only get stronger and stronger, and we need to provide solid backing for the technical persons so that they can develop new technologies and platforms on the front line without any worries.
Reference:
Jhaver, S., Ghoshal, S., Bruckman, A., & Gilbert, E. (2018). Online harassment and content moderation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 25(2), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3185593
Velásquez, N., Leahy, R., Restrepo, N. J., Lupu, Y., Sear, R., Gabriel, N., Jha, O. K., Goldberg, B., & Johnson, N. F. (2021). Online hate network spreads malicious COVID-19 content outside the control of individual social media platforms. Scientific Reports, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89467-y
Anderson, M. (2021, October 11). I-TEAM. WTVY. https://www.wtvy.com/2021/10/11/i-team-ambushed-by-images-pornography-ads-kids-video-games/
Guidry, J. P. D., O’Donnell, N. H., Miller, C. A., Perrin, P. B., & Carlyle, K. E. (2021). Pinning despair and distress – suicide- related content on visual social media platform pinterest. Crisis, 42(4), 270-277. https://doi.org/10.1027/0227-5910/a000719
D’Orazio, D. (2014, September 7). Reddit shuts down subreddit tied to nude photos in “celebgate” attack. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/7/6117145/reddit-shuts-down-thefappening-subreddit-tied-to-nude-photos
Solove, D. J. (2004). The Digital Person: Technology and privacy in the information age. NYU Press.
Waddell, K. (2016, January 19). Why google quit china-and why it’s heading back. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technlogy/archive/2016/01/why-google-quit-china-and-why-its-heading-back/424482/
