After the ‘Facebook Files’, the social media giant must be more transparent

Most people on Facebook have probably seen something they wish they hadn’t, whether it be violent pictures or racist comments.

How the social media giant decides what is and isn’t acceptable is often a mystery. Internal content guidelines, recently published in The Guardian, offer new insight into the mechanics of Facebook content moderation.

The slides show the rules can be arbitrary, but that shouldn’t be surprising. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been around for less than two decades, and there is little regulatory guidance from government regarding how they should police what people post.

In fact, the company faces a significant challenge in trying to keep up with the volume of posted content and often conflicting demands from users, advertisers and civil society organisations.

It’s certainly cathartic to blame Facebook for its decisions, but the true challenge is to work out how we want our online social spaces to be governed.

Before we can have that conversation, we need to know much more about how platforms like Facebook make decisions in practice. Read more

Nicolas Suzor - The Conversation - 22 May 2017