It's Time to Talk About Internet Companies' Content Moderation Operations

from the transparency dept

As discussed in this post below, on February 2nd, Santa Clara University is hosting a gathering of tech platform companies to discuss how they actually handle content moderation questions. Many of the participants have written short essays about the questions that will be discussed at this event -- and over the next few weeks we'll be publishing many of those essays. This first one comes from Professor Eric Goldman, who put together the conference, explaining the rationale behind the event and this series of essays.

Many user-generated content (UGC) services aspire to build scalable businesses where usage and revenues grow without increasing headcount. Even with advances in automated filtering and artificial intelligence, this goal is not realistic. Large UGC databases require substantial human intervention to moderate anti-social and otherwise unwanted content and activities. Despite the often-misguided assumptions by policymakers, problematic content usually does not have flashing neon signs saying "FILTER ME!" Instead, humans must find and remove that content—especially with borderline cases, where machines can't make sufficiently nuanced judgments.

At the largest UGC services, the number of people working on content moderation is eye-popping. By 2018, YouTube will have 10,000 people on its "trust & safety teams." Facebook's "safety and security team" will grow to 20,000 people in 2018.

Who are these people? What exactly do they do? How are they trained? Who sets the policies about what content the service considers acceptable?

We have surprisingly few answers to these questions. Occasionally, companies have discussed these topics in closed-door events, but very little of this information has been made public.

This silence is unfortunate. A UGC service's decision to publish or remove content can have substantial implications for individuals and the community, yet we lack the information to understand how those decisions are made and by whom. Furthermore, the silence has inhibited the development of industry-wide "best practices." UGC services can learn a lot from each other—if they start sharing information publicly.

On Friday, a conference called "Content Moderation and Removal at Scale" will take place at Santa Clara University. (The conference is sold out, but we will post recordings of the proceedings, and we hope to make a live-stream available). Ten UGC services will present "facts and figures" about their content moderation operations, and five panels will discuss cutting-edge content moderation issues. For some services, this conference will be the first time they've publicly revealed details about their content moderation operations. Ideally, the conference will end the industry's norm of silence.

In anticipation of the conference, we assembled ten essays from conference speakers discussing various aspects of content moderation. These essays provide a sample of the conversation we anticipate at the conference. Expect to hear a lot more about content moderation operational issues in the coming months and years.

Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has researched and taught Internet Law for over 20 years, and he blogs on the topic at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Filed Under: companies, content moderation, filtering, intermediary liability, internet platforms, moderation

Finally, RIAA Front Group Admits That Forcing YouTube To Police Site Doesn't Work Well

from the wasn't-expecting-that dept

Here's one I certainly didn't expect. A group known for spreading a bunch of bogus RIAA talking points about the evils of YouTube seems to be admitting two odd things: (1) that it's impossible to expect YouTube to accurately police all the content on its site and (2) that sharing entire published news articles is clearly not copyright infringement. The group in question is the "Content Creators Coalition" -- last seen around these parts whining about the DMCA's safe harbors on a site that only exists because of them. And it seems that bizarre and self-contradictory publicity stunts are basically the norm for this group. They've specifically been whining about how one of their videos got taken down on YouTube over an apparent terms of service violation. They complained, and YouTube reviewed it, and put the video back up. But, the Content Creators Coalition is using this to argue... something about how YouTube is trying to censor criticism?

It really doesn't make much sense, because it actually seems to be a pretty blatant admission by the Content Creators Coalition that their other bugaboo -- about how YouTube doesn't take down infringing content fast enough -- is completely silly as well. Proactively policing the millions upon millions of videos uploaded to the site (for free, mind you) is nearly impossible to do correctly. The article itself (published by the Google-hating News Corp.-owned NY Post) tries to attack YouTube's moderation features, but actually makes the perfect argument for why it's silly to expect an open platform like YouTube to police everything:

While videos of ISIS beheadings somehow slipped past YouTube censors, the video streaming site didn’t have any problems finding a playful ad campaign by some indie musicians — and promptly pulling the plug on it.

Right. Which is why it's great that we can now add the Content Creators Coalition to those who think that forcing YouTube to police and filter content on its platform is silly and will lead to unnecessary and misguided takedowns. Glad to have them on board.

Now, the only reason I even know about this article is that it was sent to me by Eric Jotkoff at Law Media Group. If you don't remember Law Media Group, they're the secretive lobbying PR shop that seems to specialize in attacking Google with really sketchy practices, such as insisting that corn farmers will be hurt by Google partnering with Yahoo, or by publishing faked op-eds, such as one about how awful net neutrality was -- but "written" by a guy who actually was in favor of net neutrality.

And when I say that Jotkoff and Law Media Group sent me that NY Post article, I do mean sent it to me. He sent me the entire article in an email. So that appears to be Law Media Group, on behalf of the Content Creators Coalition, admitting that sending around entire news articles is not infringing. Now, I'd argue that there's a good fair use case to be made for sharing full articles via email in such situations. But I wouldn't really expect a group like Law Media Group, which regularly sends me emails about the importance of stronger copyright on behalf of a whole bunch of groups that all seem to parrot the RIAA's talking points (coincidence, I'm sure?), to basically admit that reposting full articles from companies like News Corp. is fair use.

I've asked Eric to confirm that this is the official stance of the organization, but, perhaps not too surprisingly, I have not heard back at the time of publication.

Filed Under: content moderation, fair use, filters, full articles, moderation, takedowns
Companies: content creators coalition, law media group, riaa

Techdirt Reading List: The Internet Of Garbage

from the taking-out-the-trash dept

We're starting a new feature here at Techdirt, in which each week we'll promote a book -- either new or old -- that we think our audience really might enjoy reading. For a while now, we've had an Amazon widget over in the right-hand column, and all of the books we discuss here will be added to that widget, if they're not there already. And, yes, if you buy via our link to Amazon, we'll get a cut of that, so you'd be supporting Techdirt in addition to getting great and thought-provoking books to read.

This week, the book of choice is The Internet Of Garbage by Sarah Jeong.

You may already know Sarah from her prolific and entertaining Twitter feed or from her (sadly, apparently now defunct) hilariously funny email newsletter about intellectual property issues, 5 Useful Articles (which she did with Parker Higgins). Sarah has recently joined Vice, where she's a contributing editor to Motherboard. Sarah was also kind enough to participate in our Copia Institute inaugural summit, where she spoke on many of the topics raised in the book.

Given the title, some seem to be assuming that the book is a polemic against "bad stuff" online, following the standard pattern of such books that discuss how awful the internet is and then moralize about how it needs to be cleaned up. This book is different, much more nuanced and well worth reading. You probably won't agree with everything, but it will at least get you thinking about the way the internet works today, how harassment is a legitimate problem for a lot of people -- but also how the knee-jerk reactions to it aren't always that helpful either. If you want a sample, I recommend reading this excerpt about how we shouldn't be abusing copyright laws to censor content. Here's just a bit to whet your appetite:

When people are harassed on the Internet, the instinctive feeling for those targeted is that the Internet is out of control and must be reined in. The most prominent and broad regulation of the Internet is through copyright, as publicized in the thousands of lawsuits that RIAA launched against individual downloaders, the subpoenas the RIAA issued to the ISPs to unmask downloaders, and the RIAA and MPAA’s massive lawsuits against the Napsters, Groksters, and even YouTubes of the world. In our mass cultural consciousness, we have absorbed the overall success of the RIAA and the MPAA in these suits, and have come to believe that this is how one successfully manages to reach through a computer screen and punch someone else in the face.

Online harassment, amplified on axes of gender identity, race, and sexual orientation, is an issue of social oppression that is being sucked into a policy arena that was prepped and primed by the RIAA in the early 2000s. The censorship of the early Internet has revolved around copyright enforcement, rather than the safety of vulnerable Internet users. And so we now tackle the issue of gendered harassment in a time where people understand policing the Internet chiefly as a matter of content identification and removal—and most dramatically, by unmasking users and hounding them through the courts.

Yet an anti-harassment strategy that models itself after Internet copyright enforcement is bound to fail. Although the penalties for copyright infringement are massive (for example, statutory damages for downloading a single song can be up to $150,000), and although the music and movie industries are well-moneyed and well-lawyered, downloading and file-sharing continues.

The book is well worth reading (and setting aside whatever pre-conceived notions you might have about it before jumping in). It notes that nearly everyone instinctively recognizes that some forms of content moderation (e.g., spam filtering) are perfectly reasonable and also that harassment online is both very real and very damaging. But it doesn't immediately resort to ideas that we need to just start deleting "bad" content. It suggests that there are more ways to deal with such behavior than just the single broad tool of content blocking, and that various sites should be a lot more deliberate in understanding all of the options and possibilities (and exactly what those sites are trying to achieve) before jumping willy-nilly to any single solution, which may have serious consequences (intended or not).

So, go check it out and let us know what you think of the book... and of our new (hopefully) weekly book discussion.

Filed Under: content moderation, free expression, internet of garbage, reading list, sarah jeong, techdirt reading list