Leaving content moderation to volunteers is empowering racists

I.

Recently the president did a bad post, and a lot of people got mad. Twitter hid the post behind a warning. Snap said it wouldn’t promote the president’s account any more. Facebook said the post was bad but would stay up, and that made a lot of people at Facebook mad — current employees, contractors, former employees, and even employees of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who don’t work for Facebook but are indirectly funded by it.

The president’s post inspired a lot of debate about what counts as an incitement to violence, about whether you could kick a head of state off your platform, and about whether platforms are getting played by fascists. Those are all good discussions to have, though they mostly seem to avoid a larger point,...

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