"A post about the movie Cocaine Bear recommends doing cocaine while watching the movie and contains a photograph of a bag of white powder with the hashtag #cocaine"
That... seems like an obvious joke to me. And even if it's not, while "doing cocaine" is illegal, photographs of white powders are not, nor is suggesting that people do cocaine, nor is portraying them apparently doing so. We can know this is true because the producers and actors who worked on the film Cocaine Bear were not arrested.
Content moderation is hard, but I'm not very impressed that the very first card shown got it (in my opinion) totally wrong.
Moderation is hard and that example is… the perfect example. User reports are rarely accurate but still valuable.
It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations."
I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs while you watch a movie about drugs" is definitely not one of those.
It would be very easy, if that's what they want, to change it to "Content that encourages breaking local or international laws or regulations."
Then what we actually need isn't more content moderation, we need explicit laws explicitly _protecting_ website operators and any other publishers who are actually following the law.
Though we didn't first define what "integrity" meant, it now seems impossible to formulate a meaning for it that isn't absurdly ironic given the actions performed to protect it.
One could be forgiven if we were talking about a forum or website that exists in a totalitarian regime like China... better that there be some conversation than the only other option, none at all. But in the US or Europe or any other nation that considers itself even minimally enlightened?
Moderation is not the solution. It may even be the problem.
Services based in the US are not legally obligated to prevent users from writing about using cocaine, or pictures of white powders they're claiming are cocaine, or writing that it's desirable to use cocaine, so the post itself is not illegal. Real policies for content moderators should be much more detailed than what's in this game so that most moderators will reach the same conclusions about whether a post violates the policy.
OP didn't miss anything, the website is not subtly showing you how content moderation is difficult, it's telling you: we want to moderate it that way and you are failing or succeeding. That's not a lesson. That's gameplay.
The authors are very clear that there are no right or wrong answers. Interpreting it that way misses the entire point of the exercise.
Where were they clear that there are no right or wrong answers?
My God, we must run in different circles. I had people I know who shamelessly posted almost that exact thing. A few of them, lol.
They weren't joking. :P
In all after playing for about ten minutes, I have to conclude that this is some kind of corporate apologetics for bad content management. The pointless timer really drives home that this problem could be solved by spending more money on training content reviewers and hiring more of them. I came away from the game feeling like it's a sequel to Papers, Please.
I was personally more convinced of the double-bind issue after playing: different groups of people (at every level) have different norms, the Internet helps bring them all in contact with each other, and I can see how that's a recipe for making them angry with each other and also with the intermediary.
The entire concept of modern social media where every site wants to be everything to everyone is wrong. Even the "fediverse" gets this wrong IMHO. There's plenty of room on the web for all of us. Links are features, not a threat to your retention metric.
(And she doesn't take Nerf breaks!)
Also this game is interesting and I don't mind at all if they are using the game to make a point. Perhaps we all need to learn this lesson. Especially elected officials could stand to learn the problem with moderation.
Does this mean that we should disregard it? What do we do if the person we dont like is correct
That said, one important takeaway I got is that moderation needs priorities. While I’m thinking for 15s about whether a review about a herbal health product is “medically misleading” I have CSAM in the queue right after.
This would make the blue look-into-it-more button useless
> the creators value judgments are inserted (for instance “ethnic slur” is ambiguous in many real cases, eg negro could be legit in a spanish-speaking or referencing context, or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary).
You’re supposed to use the blue look-into-it-more button to figure this kind of stuff out
Isn't that the problem? If a report is in regards to the content of a post, and we have limited time, why not start with the actual content being reported first and have the reporter's arbitrary comments be secondary?
It's only not considered a slur in the second case because Vice has money, you and your friends and powerful people like Vice, and the "white trash" don't reflexively assault you like beasts when they hear the words uttered. The meaning is understood and remembered regardless.
If you liked that game, you might like Police Contraband. There is some bad combat aspects forced into the game, but it's enjoyable.
There is no “fix”. There’s no magic. It’s just us in here.
The game is tense and boring and it illustrates both why paid Facebook "moderators" suffer PTSD and why this so-called "moderation" fails to improve the content of discussion or build community.
Actually worthwhile moderation involves someone caring about the whole direction of the discussion and not merely considering "is this content over the line", especially since a large portion of "don't talk about drugs" or whatever is pure CYA. "Don't say that 'cause someone might sue us".
So it's possible on Facebook. It's just not possible for just Facebook. Reddit seems a better model for community at scale but somehow I haven't jumped into that.
reality dictates that what is or isn't acceptable content is not a function of platform policy, it's a function of the legal jurisdiction in which the content is produced and/or consumed
this isn't really complicated
you can't evaluate the acceptability of a given post on a content platform without knowledge of the relevant legal jurisdiction
the game doesn't seem to understand this core property, so (shrug) useless I guess
For eduction purpose would be cool to explain rules after the fact.
Small feedback: when there is an appeal, I'm not sure wether green means approving the appeal or stay with the initial decision.
It turns out that we don't have to speculate about this motivation, because they spelled it out quite explicitly in a blog post:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobil...
He's been writing about the difficulties of site moderation for a long time.
first few minutes : yeah this is cool this is what i wanted
not very long later : this is awful, please take it back
if i wanted to moderate something more effectively i would make a better one
i'd rather blame the difficulty of moderation itself on people's inability to innovate
The trick seems to be that you have to check the “extra info” frequently, and be reasonably quick to decide as soon as you see it. It doesn’t seem possible to make the right decision on many of the cards without that context. It is kinda fun to see all the attempts to game the system.
A few of the cards were really frustrating: the correct solution to some of them would be writing a ten-word response, or making an edit, but I only had "take down" and "leave up" buttons. (‘It's just a game!’ I remind myself.) I do hope real content moderators aren't so bereft of tooling.
The story is… really boring, actually? There are a couple dozen little things going on in the background, but not many, and there's not enough gameplay time for them to be explored. I'd hoped for something more like Papers, Please. (Judging by the achievements, there are actually several possible stories; I can only seem to get the election one.)
The sentiment of the general public doesn't seem to behave realistically, either: not when I made obviously-unpopular decisions, and not when the CEO made obviously-unpopular decisions.
I got 4 out of 5 stars with high ratings.
One thing I'd add: doxxing of a quasi legal type such as posting details about a politicians family member and their private dealings.
Certainly captures the feel of going through modqueue and making snap decisions.
Glad I don't have a boss constantly reviewing my decisions though.
Theres a relatively well known video of multiple mods at a seminar asked to decide if pieces of content should stay up or be taken down.
At no point, was there consensus.
Content that most people would consider heinous, were allowed up by at least one mod, with a strong reason to do so.
Well made!
