An interesting look at how difficult and time-consuming it is to keep online social media platforms clean and productive.
The most important aspect is the ambiguity in doing so. As part of an exercise at a conference on the subject, groups were presented with moderation situations and asked to vote on how best to proceed.
Obviously, many of the examples we chose were designed to be challenging (many based on real situations). But the process was useful and instructive. With each question there were four potential actions that the “trust & safety” team could take and on every single example at least one person chose each option. In other words, even when there was a pretty strong agreement on the course of action to take, there was still at least some disagreement.
Now, imagine (1) having to do that at scale, with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of pieces of “flagged” content showing up, (2) having to do it when you’re not someone who is so interested in content moderation that you spent an entire day at a content moderation summit, and (3) having to do it quickly where there are trade-offs and consequences to each choice — including possible legal liability — and no matter which option you make, someone (or perhaps lots of someones) are going to get very upset.
I’ve been a moderator and leader in a gaming group, and in a political / ideology listserv, and, yeah, it’s time-consuming and thankless and full of second-guessing (not least of which by oneself).
Heck, we’re all of us moderators in the conversations we start in our own online media of choice — judging when someone commenting is merely expressing a dissenting opinion shading into their being a troll who’s trying to stir up trouble (or, in-between, someone who’s honest about their opinion but corrosive to community and conversation).
But it’s a responsibility for any organization that supports a social media platform, and for anyone who creates content there. Like life, defining and enforcing the balance between order and chaos is a necessity.
I finally settled on a very simple rule:
"How long will it take me to properly decide if this is appropriate for the community?"
I hit on this after finding I could vacillate for hours trying to make a decision that would keep everyone happy. To heck with that. Any content I can't approve with more than a few seconds of thought is wasting my time, and likely the time of anyone else who sees it. It's the OP's job to describe the content in a way that makes it clear how it is appropriate and relevant, not of moderator's.
Of course, EVERYONE is WRONG on the Internet!
I moderated an emergency services forum for about four years and, yes, it is very time consuming and you never satisfy everyone. Laying down the rules at the start and then following them swiftly and strictly is a good beginning. Like +Dan Eastwood mentioned, deciding quickly whether something meets the "fair dinkum" test is important, before you can start second guessing yourself.
Moderators working for Facebook, Google+, or YouTube must have nightmares over this stuff. I couldn't do it.
If a few seconds is the max to decide whether content is appropriate, does it mean that content that takes more than these few seconds just to take in, will pass the test under the ground that it filters readers patient enough?
+Boris Borcic Usually this applies to content posted without any description (naked links). I don't have time to preview everything posted, so it needs to be relevant in some way.
I look at what the person writes about their own post first:
"Hey check out this post!"
… get removed, but
"This article is an interesting discussion of XXX, which is important to me because YYY."
… usually stays. The person writing thinks it is important enough to share, and has tried to explain why it might be interesting to others. It doesn't matter so much what that content is, so long as it is not too naughty.
If the content really needs a patient reader, then that should be part of the introduction too.
"This article is an interesting discussion of XXX. It's a long read but really gets into the issues of YYY and ZZZ. It includes a 2-hour video, but the part I would like to discuss begins at 0:45 and runs about 10 minutes."
The basic idea is the time it takes me to figure out if a post is interesting and relevant is going to be repeated by every other person in the community. If a post is appropriately described to start, everybody save a lot of time.
A well expressed opinion can make almost any content relevant.
The worst experience with moderation that I've had is with the journalists' blog on "Le Monde". Years back — about 10 years back — I once wrote a comment in French using the English orthography of "Putin" instead of the French one, while slipping in a pun over its homophony with "putain" which literally means "whore" but is used in French more like "fuck". The moderator at first didn't notice it, but when he later did he filed my IP as a spammers' and since then I can't write any comment on any blog on that site from that fixed IP. A coward without a sense of humor, IMO.
Moderating comments is different from moderating content. I usually do not moderate comments unless someone has a complaint, or I discover someone breaking community standards (respect, proselytizing, trolling).
If comments are going wild, it's usually better to ask people to self moderate rather than kick people out. Cooperative resolutions teach people to avoid the same problems the next time it comes up.
In the early days of G+ I was asked to help moderate a large community, then quickly discovered the biggest problems were no defined rules for content or conduct, and a community owner who thought banning was the answer to every problem (which really pissed people off). When the owner rage-quit in frustration, I was left in the position running a community full of angry atheists. Good times! 😉
Rules clearly stated and consistently enforced made a world of difference.
If you have no set rules then the moderation becomes the opinion of the moderator.
+Dan Eastwood I agree that setting rules is important, and there is a certain class of banworthy folk who simply cant't abide that, and so get the hammer.
But the tighter the rules, the more clever the rules lawyer. And in the most painful cases, the question gets thrown back into the subjective assessment: is this person actually acting out of sincere beliefs, and in the spirit of the dialectic? Or are they cleverly provoking rage and destruction of the social fiber under the guise of the "rules"?
I will confess I have become more free with the banhammer in my own posts. Someone mouthing stale talking point, someone engaging in ad hominem attacks, someone using epithets I cannot abide (usually anything with a "-tard" suffix) pretty quickly get the hammer, esp. if they have an undefined avatar or background or lack of publicly visible posts.
I assauge my guilt as possible unjust bans by being fairly equitable in the banning, including folk whose spirit, if not expression, I'm sympathetic toward
(While the troll community tends to favor one side over the other, their tactical goal is more over division and conflict than particular ideology. There are ostensible fellow travelers who are out to betray causes I believe in by using the tactics of the opposition.)