Content moderation, AI, and the question of scale

T Gillespie - Big Data & Society, 2020 - journals.sagepub.com
Big Data & Society, 2020journals.sagepub.com
AI seems like the perfect response to the growing challenges of content moderation on
social media platforms: the immense scale of the data, the relentlessness of the violations,
and the need for human judgments without wanting humans to have to make them. The
push toward automated content moderation is often justified as a necessary response to the
scale: the enormity of social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube stands as the
reason why AI approaches are desirable, even inevitable. But even if we could effectively …
AI seems like the perfect response to the growing challenges of content moderation on social media platforms: the immense scale of the data, the relentlessness of the violations, and the need for human judgments without wanting humans to have to make them. The push toward automated content moderation is often justified as a necessary response to the scale: the enormity of social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube stands as the reason why AI approaches are desirable, even inevitable. But even if we could effectively automate content moderation, it is not clear that we should.
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