Second Opinion: We know social media can incite violence. Moderation can help, it it's done right (via latimesopinion)
When Facebook tried to get its external Oversight Board to decide whether it should ban Donald Trump permanently, the board demurred and tossed the hot potato back to Facebook, ordering the company to make the final call within six months. But one person had unwittingly offered a vital lesson in content moderation that Facebook and other tech companies have so far missed — Trump himself.
To put it another way, judging posts exclusively by their content is like studying cigarettes to understand their toxicity. It’s one useful form of data, but to understand what smoking can do to people’s lungs, study the lungs, not just the smoke.If social media company staffers had been analyzing responses to Trump’s tweets and posts in the weeks before the Jan.
Their riot plans were unusual, fortunately, but the fact that they were visible was not. People blurt things out online. Social media make for a vast vault of human communication that tech companies could study for toxic effects, like billions of poisoned lungs. Nonetheless, no intervention should be made on the basis of software alone. Humans must review what gets flagged and make the call as to whether a critical mass of followers is being dangerously incited.
If the account holder refuses, or halfheartedly calls on their followers to stand down , the burden would shift back to the tech company to intervene. It might begin by publicly announcing its findings and its attempt to get the account holder to repudiate violence. Or it might shut down the account.
Finally, it would establish a process that treats all posters equitably, rather than, as now, tech companies giving politicians and public figures the benefit of the doubt, which too often lets them flout community standards and incite violence., for example, Facebook said it would no longer enforce its own rules against hate speech on posts from politicians and political candidates.
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