Dan SinkerNov 22, 2022

There's A LOT of discussion about content moderation right now and very little of it touches on the fact that we've all lived on the big social sites for the last decade-plus thanks to the massively exploitated labor of mostly-invisible moderation workers. The social web at scale wouldn't have happened without these laborers, who in addition to shit wages, have been exposed to literally every imaginable horror.

If we're remaking this world, let's do better on that front.

Show threadJosh BraunNov 22, 2022
@dansinker Indeed! @ubiquity75 wrote the book on this and is here. Looking forward to her continued insights.
Show threadSarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.Nov 22, 2022
@josh @dansinker Thanks, Josh. Yes, I’ve been studying content moderation _as work_, and the workers who do it, for almost 13 years. Here is my book on the subject. You may wish to check it out. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300261479/behind-the-screen
Behind the Screen

An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet   Social media on the internet c...

Yale University Press
Show threadmathew 🦜☕Nov 23, 2022
@josh @dansinker @ubiquity75 Are there any good estimates for the maximum safe user-to-moderator ratio? I kinda suspect that an instance with 100,000 users can’t possibly employ enough moderators to do a good job. Maybe social media as currently implemented (flat networks with everyone broadcasting worldwide) is just inherently bad.
Show threadSarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.Nov 23, 2022
@mathew @josh @dansinker I’m leaning toward your last statement.
Show threadmathew 🦜☕
@ubiquity75 @josh @dansinker It’s an opinion I’ve been developing for quite a while now. There’s Dunbar’s number, and there’s the problem of context collapse. Combine those, and add in a structure that rewards pile-ons, and you have a factory for manufacturing abuse. And that’s before you even introduce algorithmic bias to the timeline.
Nov 23, 2022 at 2:48amMetatext
Show threadJosh BraunNov 23, 2022
@mathew @ubiquity75 @dansinker There was an executive once on the other site who said something along the lines of, “All the academics and opinion writers nattering on about content moderation don’t understand the intractable complexities of billon-scale platforms.” And my immediate thought was, “Maybe the problem isn’t the academics, but billon-scale platforms, then?”
Show threadSarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.Nov 23, 2022
@josh @mathew @dansinker We understand the problems all too well. The problem is: their business model. Cry me a river.