Everyone knows, or should, that perfect (balanced, targeted, transparent, swift and swiftly appealable) content moderation at scale is impossible. That doesn’t mean powerful social platforms don’t have to try to get at least reasonably close, especially when access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.
That’s why so many people, including the
Meta Oversight Board
, criticized Meta for suspending a major
political Instagram account
for hours during a huge early voting push on October 17; and
for allegedly
boosting one candidate in Brazil’s recent presidential election. Meta denies deliberate interference in either instance, blaming
“mistakes”
in its automated content moderation systems (including AI tools that can’t tell the difference between enthusiastic follower engagement and a bot attack).
Mistakes or not, with early voting in the U.S. midterms already underway, these events serve as a stark reminder that all major social media platforms need to have stronger systems in place to ensure that they serve, rather than impede, democratic communication.
Access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.
This is not inherently an “AI” problem: automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities. And moderation errors are even more likely when the language is spoken principally by the global majority. In 2020, leaked document showed that Meta’s algorithms incorrectly
deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content
77 percent of the time, while
failing to det
… [more]
