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Comment by ianferrel | Hacker News Reader

In the tutorial, the very first card I was presented with was reported for being "illegal", and the description was (from memory. I might not have it quite right)

"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.

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That’s the point though, right? Encouraging illegal activity may not itself be illegal but moderators aren’t arbiters of the law, they’re protecting the integrity of the website for the intended user base. If you want to allow people to encourage cocaine usage on your website, you have to be prepared to deal with law enforcement — because when someone follows the advice and dies with the website open on their computer, the website operators will get a call… — and not many people want to risk their entire company because “it’s legal to encourage people to take cocaine!”

Moderation is hard and that example is… the perfect example. User reports are rarely accurate but still valuable.

Certainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says.

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."

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user chooses from a list that has to be designed to both provide valuable context to a moderator and capture the wide range of different understandings different users have.

Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.

There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating.

But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.

You don’t think content moderators have to deal with: “hey kid, you should go shoot up a school?”

Just cleanly not in their domain?

I think that content moderators often have to deal with that issue, and they are given rules like "remove posts that suggest that others commit violent acts" or something like that. And those are reasonable rules for moderators to enforce.

But the rules that this game give do not include that rule, and it's a mark of a poorly designed game that the rule says "don't allow illegal content" and then when you (correctly!) apply that rule, the game says "you should have not allowed this because it's suggesting that someone do something illegal". Those aren't the same rule!

ETA: Like lots of places have rules against reposting copyrighted content. But a post that said "Psst, kid, you should go download a movie from the Pirate Bay" should not be removed under that rule. Because the content of the post isn't copyrighted. If they also had a rule that said "don't encourage piracy", they could reasonably take it down under that rule.

I see I see now what you’re saying. You’ve convinced me :)

Always great to have a discussion with open-minded people. Cheers, internet buddy!

You know, I'm nearly certain that that post does violate some "international law or regulation".

Do I know which one? Nope, not a clue. But many countries have pretty weak free speech protections, and pretty strict drug laws. The idea that that violates none of them seems quite unlikely.

The fact that your local laws have strong free speech protections doesn't really matter when the criteria is "local or international". If it violates north korea's, china's, or singapores laws it still violates that restriction.

Maybe the policy should be rewritten then. If no content is allowed that violates any country's free speech restriction, then it probably means the site will remove criticism of the government of North Korea.

Well, that's a problem that social media companies have with China and India, both of which are big markets.

These are actual problems.

How is this different from moderation?

This is exactly what I encountered - mods would debate these specific issues. Is the spirit of the rule or the word of the rule met.

For global teams it’s even worse.

The rules tend to be American, and they apply globally - which means that things that are illegal locally are given a pass, and this creates the same debate in the mod team.

Moderation is phyrric. Today you come up with a good argument for behavior, tomorrow you churn your team and have 60% new people. The same argument comes up and its decided in the other direction.

> the website operators will get a call

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.

I mean not really... sometimes some content just sucks and you don't want it on your site regardless of its legality.

Start shitposting here on HN and see how long your posts hang around.

But then that becomes a site owner editorial decision rather than a fear of legal reprisals decision.

How can one protect the integrity of a website if they're undermining free speech rights and simultaneously derailing conversations and fragmenting communities while doing so?

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.

> How can one protect the integrity of a website if they're undermining free speech rights

What free speech rights? You have no legal right to compel someone else to display your words on their website.

That's an interesting theory. I'm not sure you understand the implications of it though. Were it so simple, then it is plausible enough to construct a society where you have no free speech at all, anywhere, without your legal rights being violated.

In fact, you all seem to be constructing that society even as we speak. Given the audience of this particular forum, more than a few of you are literally doing just that, rather than being accomplices and bystanders.

I'm more of a free speech fundamentalist myself.

Leaping from "I get to decide what's on my website" to "you've created a society" is pretty silly. Your argument is missing any meaningful linkages. It would be stronger if you articulated them instead of handwaving about plausibility.

Personally I don't think social media speech is that important. It's ad-based, convenience-driven, and fickle. If it were to disappear people would just move to different media.

If some magical event occurred where it did disappear, what do you imagine would be the media that people would move to?

I'm coming up blank. Could it even be non-electronic in this day and age? If it were, it'd almost certainly look identical to current social media. If it didn't look like that, what, we'd all get ham licenses and tap out our opinions in Morse? Maybe we'd set up landline partylines and gossip until the wee hours of the morning?

Would people start mailing in letters to the editor again to magazine printed on cheap acid-soaked paper? Wearing sandwich signs and walking down the sidewalks in major metropolitan areas?

It's a "Jump to Conclusions Mat". You see, you have this mat, with different conclusions written on it that you could jump to!

It's not a theory, it's literally how free speech works in the real world. Private entities can't be compelled by the government to to publish content they don't want to publish, just like they also can't be silenced by that government.

What you seem to be asking for is a world where the government can override the autonomy of publications and force them to publish specific items. How is that "free" speech?

No, that's not how it works in the real world. that's how it works in your low-fidelity perception of the real world. You've never much bothered to check if your model matches the observations you might make.

Look at the statement "private entities can't be compelled by the government". Which government are we even talking about here? It's quite clear that many governments do actually compel such things when it suits them. Have you never noticed?

You might switch to making the argument that "private governments shouldn't x", and I suppose if you were clever they might even be good arguments. You might also make the argument that this government or that government doesn't currently do it... but that boils down to "I want it to continue not compelling x". Hardly an argument, except maybe for the status quo.

You don't know what I'm asking for. It's an idea far enough outside your narrow cone of comprehension and even narrower cone of imagination that we might as well not even be speaking the same language.

The "illegal" rule requires a lot of clarification. The interpretation here seems to be "It's against our policy to post about engaging in illegal activities", or maybe "it's against our policy to advocate illegal activities".

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.

It's ironic that the first post on this thread is about missing the point of the first card that user saw.

What was the point of it, and how did I miss it?

This is showing how hard content moderation really is. It's judgement calls and very often no one is happy. Seeing more information takes an angering amount of time, which makes me think this is a fun game that makes an excellent point.

Edit: In some ways, a card that's incredibly contextual as the first one is a brilliant move.

I'm not convinced that putting a real head-scratcher as the very first choice in a tutorial mode is a brilliant move at all. Tutorials are supposed to be easy and hand-holding.

But also: this isn't actually a hard judgment call. It's just bad instructions. There's an objective difference between "content that breaks laws" and "content that promotes the breaking of laws" and the rules could easily be changed to indicate the one they want.

If you were playing a platformer tutorial and you came to a gap and the tutorial instructions said "Press A to jump over the gap" and then when you tried you fell in and died and the tutorial then said "That was too big a gap to jump over. You should have pressed [Down] to climb over it instead", would you think "Ah, what a brilliant meditation on trusting trust and how the right choice is not obvious" or would you think "this is a shitty tutorial for a dumb game"? I'm not saying there's for sure a right answer here. I could imagine a well-made game where the tutorial straight-up lies to you and gives you the wrong directions. But most games like that are just badly written and poorly thought out.

"Content that breaks laws" "Content that promotes the breaking of laws" "Content that is clearly satire/parody/a joke"

A lot of time context matters. In a forum thread called "What would be the worst title for a self help book?" a post that just says "Give up, kill yourself" is not actually promoting self harm. It's saying that its the worst advice.

assuming the entire point of the game is "moderation is harder than you think, stop assuming all mods are power tripping, they have tough choices to make!" -- the tutorial isn't supposed to be teaching you how to answer the questions properly, because answering questions properly isn't the point of the game. It's teaching you that about how hard moderation is.

Also, I've played plenty of games where the tutorial involves dying and then the follow up is learning how not to die (generally in games where dying is common and they want to indicate that "dying isn't the same as game over, this isn't Super Mario for NES")

I think that content moderation is in fact quite difficult, even given clear rules to follow, because so much content requires lots of context to understand.

But that makes me even more annoyed at this game which rather than presenting me with legitimately difficult judgment calls, just gave me clear rules that were not the rules that the actual game used when determining whether I did the right thing.

It's possible that this is a cleverly designed thing to make you realize that the real rules are unwritten and the whole thing is a Kafkaesque contraption with no correct answers. Or it's just a quickly-made game where no one proofread the actual instructions they were giving players.

It seems like a very thoughtful game to me. I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.

It's not, because the site tells you there is a perfect answers. On this card, it tells you should ban it.

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.

> Content moderation is hard, but I'm not very impressed that the very first card shown got it (in my opinion) totally wrong

The authors are very clear that there are no right or wrong answers. Interpreting it that way misses the entire point of the exercise.

I mean, when I approved leaving up the cocaine post, the game that they authored gave me a big red X and said I did it wrong that it clearly was illegal and should have been taken down.

Where were they clear that there are no right or wrong answers?

The users who submit reports are fallible, the moderators are fallible, and the bosses who rate the moderators are also fallible. Sometimes you'll be right and the system will still say you're wrong.

> the bosses who rate the moderators are also fallible. Sometimes you'll be right and the system will still say you're wrong.

those are not the difficulties of moderating though, those are the difficulties of general employment.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobil...

> Also, there’s often no “correct” answer, so the game won’t tell you if you got something “right” or “wrong” because often there is no right or wrong.

...that seems like an obvious joke to you?

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

It’s not just about what’s legal, it’s whatever the boss says

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