A good glimpse at content moderation, and why it’s important to do it correctly.

This is a neat game that shows how difficult content moderation is. Excited to have my content management students play it in the Fall.

Content moderation is hard, and it’s especially hard at scale. Because AI makes doing things at scale easier, it necessarily makes content moderation harder.

I’m tired of reading Twitter news, but I’m professionally obligated to do so, no matter how dumb it gets.

This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem.

I don’t know enough about OpenAI to evaluate these concerns, but I think these questions are important. The power of AI means that the companies that control them are also in a position of power, and it’s important that we treat them critically. That said, while I do think making LLM code open source is probably better in the aggregate, it isn’t without concerning drawbacks: The minute it was released under an open license, I’m sure Gab’s Andrew Torba would be considering how to make a homebrew version that can’t be content moderated.

Content moderation is hard, and moderating AI content definitely seems harder to me. However, so long as OpenAI has control over ChatGPT (and benefits from others’ use of it), I do think it has a responsibility to shape what it can produce. That said, there remains a deeper, legitimate question about how much influence a single company should have over LLM output.

Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.

I’ve posted a bunch of articles about this already, but Masnick’s take is super helpful.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

Musk is getting pettier and more self-centered.

I think this headline captures one of the worst parts of all of this: Musk isn’t just dismissing concerns about behavior, he’s fueling that behavior.

If I could pick one story to demonstrate that Musk’s Twitter tenure has been blundering and inconsistent…

I’m glad I began reading Techdirt before this whole mess started… Masnick’s persective has been a helpful guide.

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This seems petty, immature, and misguided.

Oh good, so on top of the unexpected chaos, the expected chaos is also still happening.

Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?

They’re so obvious as to almost not be worth pointing out, but two points: First, this is why making verification a paid feature is dumb; and second, penalizing parody because your business model is dumb is not what free speech absolutism looks like.

Content moderation is a good thing, and not all viewpoints deserve a seat at a table.

Interesting read here from Masnick. I’m not familiar with everything he writes about here, but I always appreciate his perspective.

This is juvenile enough that I feel guilty finding it funny, but it’s a good demonstration of the problems with this backlash against content moderation.

Great movie, great example of the difficulty of content moderation.

We need to do more work to divorce free speech from content moderation. The world without content moderation would be a much worse world, and we don’t want to live in it. Sure, social media platforms are too powerful, but this is not the answer.

See, this is censorship.

I appreciate the way that Masnick uses examples from the news to call out how dumb some of these laws are.

This is why the EFF and others have concerns about overreach of even clearly well intentioned content moderation. CSAM is clearly despicable, but automated content moderation can make mistakes, and consequences for those mistakes aren’t small.

Masnick makes two good points here: The GOP seems to only care about content moderation in self-serving ways, but also we should be wary of political mandates for content moderation.

Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms.

Unsurprising, but still a valuable read.

Here’s the EFF pointing out that “free speech” on these platforms means something very particular rather than a broad, deep commitment to legally-protected expression.

So, here’s a case where TikTok’s Chinese ownership is actually a really big deal—though, of course, YouTube and other U.S. companies have also been quicker to moderate than to archive material that could be valuable in a similar way.

A terrifying teminder that content moderation can easily overreach.

Good example here of how content moderation can absolutely overreach. Arguments that platforms shouldn’t moderate are nonsense, but I appreciate Masnick’s emphasis on the need to be very careful about how we moderate.