Tag Archives: Content moderation

Information and the public sphere

Fear > Loathing: a broader net for dangerous speech online

The Psychology of Technology Institute reports on research conducted by Professor Kiran Garimella of Rutgers on content moderation and the design of online platforms.

Specifically, Garimella studied ‘fear speech’, a type of online activity that has many of the negative connotations of ‘hate speech’ but, by eschewing the latter’s inflammatory tone and ad hominem attacks, is much harder to counter, both in terms of devising automated systems to identify and remove it, and in discursive terms to expose and debunk it. The spread of false, misinformed, or decontextualized statements (generally, but not exclusively, pertaining to some stigmatized group) does not automatically result in the naming and shaming of responsible parties or in calls to action (or violence), but it sets the stage, forms or reinforces a general climate of opinion, comforts an audience in its prejudices and normalizes extreme assessments of states of fact on which further extremist appeals may be built.

One of the reasons fear speech bypasses many of the roadblocks we have erected to the spread of hate speech is that its rhetorical form is one we are extremely familiar and comfortable with in our heavily technological and risk-laden societies. What is unique to fear speech is its ability to mix the epistemic thrill of conspiracy theory with the practical, down-to-earth, and seemingly neutral tone of the PSA. After all, this is not much of a novelty: prejudice has often been couched in prudential terms— “not all members of a stigmatized group may be nefarious and vicious, but when in doubt…”.

The implication of Garimella’s research is that, if we are serious about removing dangerous speech from our online environments, it is necessary to cast a wider net, focusing not only on the narrow band of clearly and openly aggressive hate speech, but addressing its precursors as well, the false, baseless and irrational fears out of which hate grows, and its mongers. This position, in turn, dovetails with the Psychology of Technology Institute’s own contention that design should be the focus of information governance, rather than downstream content moderation.

This position is closely argued, prima facie reasonable, and clearly germane to the struggles many organizations, big and small, private and public, have with speech content. I fail, nonetheless, to be completely convinced. For one thing, freedom of speech concerns become salient as soon as obvious threats and incitement are taken out of the equation. In order to label fears as false or groundless, it would become necessary to lean even more heavily into fact-checking, a process not without its own political pitfalls. Moreover, the unequal distribution of risk propensities on different issues within a polity surely must be a legitimate basis for political sorting, organization, and choice. However we may feel normatively about it, fear is a longstanding mechanism for political mobilization, and furthermore certain scholars (such as George Lakoff, for example) have claimed that its use is not symmetrical along the political spectrum, which would lend these proposals a (presumably unwelcome) partisan slant.

I believe that in considering fear speech and its possible limitations, it is helpful to begin with the motivations of the three parties: the speaker, the audience, and the information overseer. Specifically, what is the goal pursued in attempts to curtail fear speech? Is it to silence bad actors / stigmatize bad behaviors? Is it to prevent mutual discovery and community-building between people already convinced of beliefs we find objectionable? Or is it to shield the malleable, the unwary, the unattentive from misleading information that may lead them eventually to embrace objectionable beliefs? Empirically, information overseers (a national government, say, or a social media platform) may well hold all three, perhaps subsumed by the overriding imperative to preserve the reputation of the forum. But analytically it is important to distinguish the motivations, so as to understand what a proposed remedy portends for each, how it affects the incentives of each type of speaker and each segment of audience. And the key consideration in this respect is how it impacts their likelihood of voice and/or exit, visible protest vs. the redirection of communication in another forum. Only on this basis is it possible to evaluate the feasibility or desirability of curbs to online fear speech.

Comparative and international policy-making

Workshopping trust and speech at EDMO

It was a great pleasure to convene a workshop at the European Digital Media Observatory today featuring Claire Wardle (Brown), Craig Matasick (OECD), Daniela Stockmann (Hertie), Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford), Lisa Ginsborg (EUI), Emma Briant (Bard) and (briefly) Alicia Wanless (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). The title was “Information flows and institutional reputation: leveraging social trust in times of crisis” and the far-ranging discussion touched on disinformation, trust vs. trustworthiness, different models of content moderation, institutional design, preemptive red-teaming of policies, algorithmic amplification, and the successes and limits of multi-stakeholder frameworks. A very productive meeting, with more to come in the near future on this front.

Information and the public sphere

Future publishing on disinformation

My chapter abstract entitled “Censorship Choices and the Legitimacy Challenge: Leveraging Institutional Trustworthiness in Crisis Situations” has been accepted for publication in the volume Defending Democracy in the Digital Age, edited by Scott Shackelford (of Indiana University) et al., to appear with Cambridge UP in 2024.

In other news, I am writing a book review of the very interesting grassroots study by Francesca Tripodi entitled The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy (Yale UP) for the Italian journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa.

Information and the public sphere

Excess skepticism and the media trust deficit

An interesting presentation at the MISDOOM 2022 conference earlier this week: Sacha Altay (Oxford) on the effectiveness of interventions against misinformation [pre-print here].

Altay lays out some established facts in the academic literature that at times get lost in the policy debate. The main one is that explicit disinformation, i.e. unreliable news such as that generated on propaganda websites that run coordinated influence operations, represents a minuscule segment of everyday people’s media consumption; however, the public has been induced to be indiscriminately skeptical of all news, and therefore doubts the validity even of bona fide information.

Thus, it would appear that a policy intervention aimed at explaining the verification techniques employed by professional journalists to vet reliable information should be more effective, all else being equal, than one that exposes the workings of purposeful disinformation. On the other hand, as Altay recognizes, misinformation is, at heart, a mere symptom of a deeper polarization, an attitude of political antagonism in search of content to validate it. But while such active seeking of misinformation may be fringe, spontaneous, and not particularly dangerous for democracy, generalized excess skepticism and the ensuing media trust deficit are much more serious wins for the enemies of open public discourse.

Domestic politics and elections

Rightwing algorithms?

A long blog post on Olivier Ertzscheid’s personal website [in French] tackles the ideological orientation of the major social media platforms from a variety of points of view (the political leanings of software developers, of bosses, of companies, the politics of content moderation, political correctness, the revolving door with government and political parties, the intrinsic suitability of different ideologies to algorithmic amplification, and so forth).

The conclusions are quite provocative: although algorithms and social media platforms are both demonstrably biased and possessed of independent causal agency, amplifying, steering, and coarsening our public debate, in the end it is simply those with greater resources, material, social, cultural, etc., whose voices are amplified. Algorithms skew to the right because so does our society.