Its clear that the broken element in this process is not the AI banning the writer of the post, but the poor presumably human review
The typical argument for AI moderation in these situations is something along the lines of "Twitter is so big how could we possibly moderate at this scale without AI?"
Does a company have a right to scale faster than it has the ability to properly moderate? Should they?
Looking at a more extreme example: If General Motors used AI to design cars and they increased the likelihood of fatalities, would we feel any different?
A right? Yes.
>Looking at a more extreme example: If General Motors used AI to design cars and they increased the likelihood of fatalities, would we feel any different?
Getting (temporarily?) banned from Twitter isn't even close to being as bad as a fatality, so the GM example doesn't make any sense.
The human is there to rubber stamp the AI decision as fast as possible, so that Twitter can tell you your case has been reviewed by a human and settled. The important metric is speed, because that directly translates into cost.
It's a force multiplier that every social media platform needs to not drown in costs for human moderation. Especially human moderation as described above.
Unless you get people to pay for social media. Good luck with that.
If that ban by AI is available for review and appeal, it's just triage that admits false positives. The alternatives that I can fathom is to either allow unsavory and potentially harmful content to be present on your platform until human eyes get on them, or to have all comments await moderation until human eyes get on them.
Especially when it comes to Google, which tries to entangle itself in every aspect of your life, being banned from all services without any potential for a proper review just because a neural network decided to throw a hissy fit is completely unacceptable.
Automated review is not good enough for services that are so large that they are de facto public squares. If the world were just, when you got that big, the rules would change to prohibit you from doing service-wide content filtering.
> ...calling for more automation and less traumatic moderation work.
Pay me 80% of what I would be making as a programmer (and keep up with changes in the market rate for programmers), and I'd be totally willing to do that moderation work. [0] There are _tons_ of people who have my intestinal fortitude out there... problem is that the enormous "social media" companies don't want to pay enough to get people who are well-suited for the work.
[0] You might counter with "Oh, well you can't _possibly_ imagine the things you'll see, you're all bluster and bravado and will quit within the month!". I'd counter with "Yeah, well you have no idea the things that I _have_ seen.".
Unfortunately, Wings's self-driving AI is much likely to destroy property than a human driver. As a result, some members of the public have called for every Wings car to be remotely controlled by a human. However, others push back. Employing good human drivers would be nearly impossible at the scale of Wings. Here is an interview with a poor grandmother who relies on Wings to see her family, and here's how a nonprofit uses Wings to find homes for lost puppies. You don't really don't want to go back to paid Uber and Lyft rides, do you?
There are a couple of problems with this analogy. But the core point is this—if a company can't sustain a key aspect of their business at scale, then perhaps they shouldn't be able to scale.
(I do see mass protests against Uber though).
Boo fucking hoo.
The money is the problem here. We should require them to spend that money, and if they can't remain profitable while employing sufficient human moderators to not be a net detriment to society, they should not be allowed to keep operating.
We've gotten way too far down the rabbit hole of "any company that can conceivably exist must be allowed to exist, so long as they can make a profit."
We really need to get back to companies having to provide some meaningful net benefit to society, rather than just making scads of money for their owners.