by Kit Knightly, Off Guardian:
AI-driven content moderation is subtly shaping public opinion and political engagement
Facebook make only about £34 a year from the average customer in the UK – a little under £3 a month (and that’s before costs) so clearly there is no head-room or motivation, for a human level of customer service or attention. The user is not the customer; rather, they are the product whose data is sold to advertisers.
Thus, users do not have a direct customer relationship with the platform. The network is not directly incentivised to “care” about the user before the advertiser. And no matter where you lie on the spectrum between “free speech absolutism” and “private entities have the right to censor any user”, with such low margins it is inevitable machine processing will have to be used to moderate posts and deal with the customer interface.
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But it is a fact the customer processing and management capabilities Social Networks are now evolving is being utilised in a variety of ways beyond just moderation. And it is also true this automated processing is being done at scale and is now applied to every post every member makes. 68% of US voters are on Facebook. In the UK it’s 66% and France 73.2%. The figures are similar for every democratic nation in the West. So it is vitally important the applied rules should be politically neutral.
The power that exists within the ability to machine-process every users posts is far deeper and more profound than perhaps many realise. And while it can’t directly dictate what users write in their messages it has the capacity to fundamentally shape which messages gain traction.
Social Media services have become de-facto town squares and most would agree their corporate owners should avoid ever putting a hand on the scales and influencing politics.
Additionally as everyone who uses Facebook is aware, especially when it comes to politically sensitive topics, the system will qualify an individual’s reach; sometimes to an extreme degree. Or that user will simply be banned for a period of time, or banned from the network entirely.
So we can ask the question, since the social media corporations have so much censorship power, how do we know they aren’t engaging in unethical political interference? Can they be trusted with the responsibility?
I will return to this question, but it’s clear that trust in these corporations is deeply misplaced.
The pandemic woke many people up to the levels of control those in charge of our Social Media networks are imposing. They, write the rules to boost engagement for posts they favour, making certain individuals’ follower counts more valuable. Conversely, users who go against the grain (or against the establishment narrative) see their engagement subtly reduced or even tank, or they can be banned from the service entirely. And the evidence is that, somewhat contrary to the principles of democracy, hands have been very firmly placed on the scales at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he invited independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Schellenburger into the Twitter offices to research internal company communications and see how far the previous owners had been censoring user tweets.
The Twitter Files are the result, and they clearly demonstrate there has been interference on a major scale and that it has also in many cases been on political grounds. The Twitter Files team established government agencies have been firmly embedded at the company monitoring and censoring US citizens and the citizens of other nations and government agencies were regularly (strongly) requesting censorship actions. But more than this they have also revealed similar levels of interference have been taking place at other Social Media networks such a Facebook.
