[ianferrel]

Certainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says.

It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations."

I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs while you watch a movie about drugs" is definitely not one of those.

It would be very easy, if that's what they want, to change it to "Content that encourages breaking local or international laws or regulations."

[oldtownroad]

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user chooses from a list that has to be designed to both provide valuable context to a moderator and capture the wide range of different understandings different users have.

Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.

[ianferrel]

There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating.

But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.

[ethanbond]

You don’t think content moderators have to deal with: “hey kid, you should go shoot up a school?”

Just cleanly not in their domain?

[ianferrel]

I think that content moderators often have to deal with that issue, and they are given rules like "remove posts that suggest that others commit violent acts" or something like that. And those are reasonable rules for moderators to enforce.

But the rules that this game give do not include that rule, and it's a mark of a poorly designed game that the rule says "don't allow illegal content" and then when you (correctly!) apply that rule, the game says "you should have not allowed this because it's suggesting that someone do something illegal". Those aren't the same rule!

ETA: Like lots of places have rules against reposting copyrighted content. But a post that said "Psst, kid, you should go download a movie from the Pirate Bay" should not be removed under that rule. Because the content of the post isn't copyrighted. If they also had a rule that said "don't encourage piracy", they could reasonably take it down under that rule.

[ethanbond]

I see I see now what you’re saying. You’ve convinced me :)

[ianferrel]

Always great to have a discussion with open-minded people. Cheers, internet buddy!

[intended]

How is this different from moderation?

This is exactly what I encountered - mods would debate these specific issues. Is the spirit of the rule or the word of the rule met.

For global teams it’s even worse.

The rules tend to be American, and they apply globally - which means that things that are illegal locally are given a pass, and this creates the same debate in the mod team.

Moderation is phyrric. Today you come up with a good argument for behavior, tomorrow you churn your team and have 60% new people. The same argument comes up and its decided in the other direction.

[gpm]

You know, I'm nearly certain that that post does violate some "international law or regulation".

Do I know which one? Nope, not a clue. But many countries have pretty weak free speech protections, and pretty strict drug laws. The idea that that violates none of them seems quite unlikely.

The fact that your local laws have strong free speech protections doesn't really matter when the criteria is "local or international". If it violates north korea's, china's, or singapores laws it still violates that restriction.

[DennisP]

Maybe the policy should be rewritten then. If no content is allowed that violates any country's free speech restriction, then it probably means the site will remove criticism of the government of North Korea.

[rodgerd]

Well, that's a problem that social media companies have with China and India, both of which are big markets.

These are actual problems.