Context doesn't matter, they can't afford this being on the platform and being interpreted with different context. I think flagging it is understandable given their scale (I still wouldn't use them, but that's a different story).
I have to disagree. The idea that allowing human interaction to proceed as it would without policing presents a threat to their business or our culture is not something I have seen strong enough argument for.
Allowing flagging / reporting by the users themselves is a better path to content control.
IMO the more we train ourselves that context doesn't matter, the more we will pretend that human beings are just incapable of humor, everything is offensive, and trying to understand others before judging their words is just impossible, so let the AI handle it.
But then you have problems like doxing. Or even without doxing promoting acts that affect certain groups or certain places. Which certain amount of people will follow, just because of the scale. You can say these people would be responsible, but with scale you can hurt without breaking the law. So where would you draw the line? Would you moderate anything?
I don't envy anyone who has to figure all this out. IMO free hosting does not scale.
And then the political firestorm that ensued, from people with the power to regulate Meta, quickly changed his talking points.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
[3]https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/gambia-...
Substack is human moderated but the moderators are from another culture so will often miss forms of humour that do not exist in their own culture (the biggest one being non-literal comedy, very literal cultures do not have this, this is likely why the original post was flagged...they would interpret that as someone telling another person to literally set their house on fire).
I am not sure why this isn't concerning: large platforms deny your ability to express yourself based on the dominant culture in the place that happens to be the only place where you can economically employ moderators...I will turn this around, if the West began censoring Indonesian TV based on our cultural norms, would you have a problem with this?
The flip side of this is also that these moderators will often let "legitimate targets" be abused on the platform because that behaviour is acceptable in their country, is that ok?
Biased, but I don't think that's the worst thing.
But I'm sure Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, India, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, and a lot of quasi-religious or -authoritarian states would disagree.
Well given that we know Russia, China, and North Korea all have massive campaigns to misinform everyone on these platforms, I think I disagree with the premise. It's spread a sort of fun house mirror version of US values, and the consequences seem to be piling up. The recent elections in places like Argentina, Italy, and The Netherlands seem to show that far-right populism is becoming a theme. Anecdotally it's taking hold in Canada as well.
People are now worried about problems they have never encountered. The Republican debate yesterday spending a significant amount of time on who has the strictest bathroom laws comes to top of mind at how powerful and ridiculous these social media bubbles are.
Coupled with a vestigial strain of anything-goes-on-the-internet. (But not things that draw too much political flak)
The bubbles aren't the problem; it's engagement as a KPI + everyone being neurotic. Turns out, we all believe in at least one conspiracy, and presenting more content related to that is a reliable way (the most?) to drive engagement.
You can't have democratic news if most people are dumb or insane.
So, yeah, context does matter it seems