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.

The Internet of Damned Things

We have to be aware that when you cre­ate mag­ic or occult things, when they go wrong they become hor­ror. Because we cre­ate tech­nolo­gies to soothe our cul­tur­al and social anx­i­eties, in a way. We cre­ate these things because we’re wor­ried about secu­ri­ty, we’re wor­ried about cli­mate change, we’re wor­ried about threat of ter­ror­ism. Whatever it is. And these devices pro­vide a kind of stop­gap for help­ing us feel safe or pro­tect­ed or whatever.

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.