Gif-sharing service Giphy is back on Snapchat after an incident last month involving an extremely goddamn racist gif that slipped past moderation filters, according to the Verge.
On Tuesday at tech festival SXSW, streaming site and Google subsidiary YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki proposed one solution to the conspiracy screeds and “false flag” hoax videos that are slowly but surely taking over the site by gaming its algorithms.
Following the mass school shooting which killed 17 people and wounded over a dozen others in Parkland, Florida this month, YouTube launched a campaign to use some of its 10,000 new moderators to somewhat thin out the ranks of the conspiracy peddlers and far-right nuts which have become rampant across the site. Though …
Following Twitter, Discord, Imgur, and Pornhub, Reddit has taken action to ban the posting of AI-generated fake porn—commonly called “deepfakes.”
In what’s becoming a depressing genre, The Wall Street Journal published a story today profiling the very human moderators who prevent the internet from becoming a completely murder-filled terror and abuse machine. Usually hired as contractors, these workers do the dirty work of reviewing flagged posts for internet…
Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would finally be changing its moderation policies in what was popularly received as an acknowledgement how badly hordes of trolls, white supremacists and swastika-toting Pepes have overrun the site for years. The new guidelines (which Twitter has touted as simply a…
As you may have heard, YouTube is growing its content moderation team to 10,000 staffers. Sounds like progress! Of course, the move comes as a response to the ever-expanding gallery of horrors the site has unwittingly played host to over the years—most recently, various forms of child exploitation and predation—but…
Google, along with fellow tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter has drawn increasing scrutiny this year over concerns that its “concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings,” as the New York Times put it. In recent months, it’s faced stumbling blocks when it returned misinformation and…
Maybe it’s happened to you. You’re cruising around YouTube and then boom: a video of Spiderman hanging out with girls in bikinis trying to make Elsa from Frozen jealous and then the Joker appears, ready to fight. This would seem like a weird video to any sane adult. But the weirdest thing is that it’s actually made…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted on Friday that the company’s minimalist approach to moderation was not working, saying the site is committed to taking a “more aggressive stance in our rules and how to enforce them” in the wake of numerous high-profile public relations nightmares.
In recent years, Reddit has banned a bevy of far-right troll havens, including its board for the white supremacist “alt-right” and others used for the harassment of women, minorities and other people. The bans were a reversal of Reddit’s prior policy to not ban “questionable” content—and drew predictable outrage,…
Facebook has a problem. Not the one where they admitted to being a megaphone for propaganda and psy-ops. Or the one where they narced on at-risk teens. No, today’s news concerns how the social giant/massive data collection scheme has (increasingly) become an unwilling platform for users to broadcast violent crimes, …
Over 25 million users have flocked to Discord, a text and voice platform for gamers, since its launch in May of 2015. Despite the company raising at least 30 million in venture capital funding, the company has only five “customer experience” personnel and no moderators on its staff. From what I’ve seen, users who…
A decade is all it took, more or less, for the internet to become unmanageable.
Reddit’s new chief alien, Steve Huffman, announced a vaguely worded set of new content guidelines yesterday afternoon. The general takeaway? Bad stuff is bad and should be banned. The subtext? If Steve Huffman says stuff isn’t bad—like racism—it’ll be tolerated. Come again?
Isn't Facebook great? (It's not.) But isn't it nice and clean and kid friendly? This is true for a very specific reason: the social media giant outsources the gnarly task of finding and deleting inappropriate content. In the November issue of Wired, Adrian Chen offers a peek into the darkest corners of the industry.…
