> Content moderation doesn’t work at scale. Any scheme which attempts it is bound to fail. For sites which need continuous user growth, that is a problem. So what can they do? Well, we know what doesn’t work:
Simply having minimal or no moderation results in a trash fire of bigotry and illegal content, quickly hemorrhaging any potential revenue and potentially landing a platform in legal trouble.
Automating moderation inevitably blocks legitimate content that wasn’t targeted, and is gamed by bad actors who get around it.
Every approach comes to the same conclusion—a platform needs workers: Lots of them, around the clock. ...
What Reddit Got Wrong
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong
@mc We literally just had precedent after precedent showing that platforms won't be held liable for random things someone posts, unless they're involved in it.
Even the frivolous lawsuits over whether Twitter made a mistake in it's moderative decisions over child porn, and Reddit simply had a piece of child porn on it's site (even if they would get to moderating it), were dismissed. Two things where there might've been potential liability.
It was very questionable whether these lawsuits had merit, even several years ago.
This is honestly consistent with First Amendment principles that liability can lead to chilling effects where far more than just intended content is removed. If it would apply in a book store, I don't see why it shouldn't apply when so much more expression is at stake.
https://qoto.org/@olives/110547472857036416 I wrote some about what the EFF got wrong about Reddit. They completely missed puritanism, whether it's censorship, suppression of content, or all those discussions where they were going to do censorship.
Policies are unilaterally changed without any real justification to it (and it's down so rather arbitrarily). It's all down to corporate priorities. All of this has been creeping up for the past five years. If the EFF doesn't want events like this happen, they've got to be far more proactive about spotting it as it develops.
