I wonder how that would work for Facebook, for example. Facebook Groups have admins, but for general posts to the public (or to friends) - could they be user-moderated?
Facebook (like most corporations) operates an autocracy. However, unlike most corporations Facebook generates 100B+ in revenue per year (more than most countries), is worth $1T+ (again, more than most countries), and home to 3B+ users daily lives (trifecta, more than all countries). It's time to acknowledge the company that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is a duck.
If Facebook was so inclined to change their governance model, a plethora of prior art exists, in public sector government implementations, for them to build from. An endeavor of this magnitude is neither easy nor simple nor palatable to more engineering-inclined minds, but it's perhaps generational opportunity for a person/company to truly lead and innovate on such a ubiquitous digital platform.
Are you trying to imply that Facebook is a country? Because this doesn’t make any sense. Countries have an entirely different set of obligations, duties, and jobs to be done than a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment.
Moderation then becomes: what do the local cops tell people to stop saying. Government moderation policy thus approaches social media moderation policy.
And no, I'm not advocating for Facebook to be nationalized or broken up. I'm specifically pointing out the thought that Facebook could innovate here; they have an opportunity to establish the first truly global self-governing internet-based company in history.
> a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment
This statement is deliberately obtuse. Facebook is a communal space used by 3B people every day to mediate conversations, transactions, news consumption, business, events, etc. I'd hardly say people building their livelihood off of Facebook is "light communication" or "entertainment". Again, look no farther than HN to find examples of Facebook's governance policies harming their users with no explanation or due process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29614629.
My Facebook feed as it used to be, general life updates by various friends, is pretty much dead. Nobody posts these things anymore. However, neighbourhood groups, Buy Nothing groups, and other local special interest groups thrive, I see several daily posts in each. Plus Facebook constantly recommends me more groups. This is a n=1 experience but I wonder whether Facebook is 'falling apart' into these groups.
The admins of the groups are responsible for managing the discussion in groups including frontline anti-spam against the porn bots and the shoe bots and whatever. So it's semi-distributed moderation. (Assuming group admins care, but if they don't then users just abandon the group.)
Compared to e.g. Reddit, FB groups aren't as world readable or writable as subreddits are so you don't really get that classic inter-subreddit drama.
Where global moderation is still needed from FB's perspective is when group activities start spilling outside of that group, e.g. because they're coordinating extremist activity.
This probably won't be the result of user reports though. For privacy and scalability that implies an automated system which (hopefully reliably but only rarely) flags posts to a human working for FB.
Then again the wikipedia community is full of drama.
This is essentially what Reddit does. It mostly works for communities about headphones, bicycles or water bottles, but not Donald Trump, piracy or child porn. Reddit had to close some subreddits down, not because their users complained, their users were perfectly happy and considered the moderation to be just fine, but the harm to society / the company's PR image / advertisers was too great.