EFF: Social Media Councils: A Better Way Forward, Window Dressing, or Global Speech Police?
Social Media Councils: A Better Way Forward, Window Dressing, or Global Speech Police? Social media platforms routinely make arbitrary and contradictory decisions about what speech to block or penalize. No one is happy with the status quo: not people who want more censorship, nor people who want less censorship, nor people who simply want platforms to make different choices so that already-marginalized groups won’t bear the brunt of their censorship policies. So many are looking for a better way forward. EFF offered a few thoughts on this last week, but we’ve also been looking at another persistent and intriguing idea , spearheaded largely by our friends at Article 19 : the creation of social media council (SMC) to review content moderation decisions. Ever since Facebook announced a plan to create its own version, there’s been a surge of interest in this approach. Can it work? At root, the concept is relatively simple: we can’t trust the platforms to do moderation well, so mayb...