Pattern Matching
Twitter and Facebook Experiment With Offloading Content Moderation
Birdwatch and the Oversight Board are new approaches to the same idea: shifting responsibility away from the platforms themselves
In the never-ending scramble to solve the insoluble problem of content moderation, social media companies are willing to try just about anything — as long as it doesn’t involve making it a core part of their business.
Contrasting approaches were on display this week from Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Oversight Board, a semi-independent body that it created as a sort of appeals court for content moderation decisions, ruled on its first slate of five cases. While Facebook was turning to its elite panel of well-known figures from around the world, Twitter announced a project called Birdwatch that enlists ordinary users to flag, label, and annotate misleading tweets.
One is punting moderation to its own private international court of justice; the other is hoping to crowdsource it to a cadre of volunteers. Does either model hold promise for making online content moderation more consistent, credible, and effective?
