Archive

Behind the Screen: The People and Politics of Commercial Content Moderation

When I asked my peers and my professors if they’d ever heard of this type of work, two things happened. The first thing is that they said no, they hadn’t. The second thing they said, which is probably what you’re thinking, is, “Well, can’t computers do that?” And in fact the answer to that is no.

Sin in the Time of Technology

Social media companies have an unparalleled amount of influence over our modern communications. […] These companies also play a huge role in shaping our global outlook on morality and what constitutes it. So the ways in which we perceive different imagery, different speech, is being increasingly defined by the regulations that these platforms put upon us [in] our daily activities on them.

Eleanor Saitta at The Conference 2015

What I’m talking about here is not what we need to do culturally or politically, it’s not the roots of online harassment. It’s the design tools that we can use to shape the environments that people interact in to reduce the impact.