Facebook Experimenting With Letting Users Help Write Content Moderation Policies

Facebook regularly faces blowback and controversies over how it handles content moderation issues. That’s what led the company to create an independent Oversight Board to help it make decisions, and now, according to a report in The Verge this week, the company may soon be asking users themselves to help write its moderation policies.

From February to April this year, Facebook gathered three groups of people across five countries to answer a test question: what should the company do about problematic climate content? It gave these users access to climate experts, educational resources, and more, then gave them several options about how they could handle the problem. And according to the company, the experiment was a success.

“We think that if you set this up the right way, that people are in a great position to deliberate on and make some of the hard decisions (around) trade-offs, and inform how we proceed,” Meta vice president of governance Brent Harris told The Verge. “It was actually really striking how many folks, when they came together, agreed on what they thought the right approach would be.”

While this is a more fair and democratic process than the current one, it also gives Facebook a convenient excuse to wash its hands of decision-making responsibilities. Still, it would be great if the company gave more of a voice to its users like this.




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