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- 🔆 When Machines Become Our Digital Bouncers: AI in Content Moderation
🔆 When Machines Become Our Digital Bouncers: AI in Content Moderation
TikTok's latest workforce shift, US national security, and wildlife conservation.
Emma G Moller & Allegra Guinan
October 31, 2024
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🗞️ Issue 42 // ⏱️ Read Time: 5 min
Hello 👋
Dog and cat videos, vacation photos, heated political debates. This is some of the content you see on social media. What about all the content you don’t see? Behind every social feed is an invisible army of content moderators, both human and AI, working to keep the digital world from descending into chaos. It's time to pull back the curtain on how content moderation really works.
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: The massive scale of content moderation happening across social media platforms, who's doing it (humans and AI), and how these decisions shape our online experiences.
How it’s relevant: With platforms making millions of moderation decisions in a single day, understanding who makes these calls and how they're made is crucial for anyone who uses social media - which is pretty much all of us.
Why it matters: Understanding the scale and mechanics of content moderation helps us grasp how platforms are balancing automation with human oversight, and what that means for workers, users, and society at large.
Big tech news of the week…
🇺🇲 US President Biden issued the nation’s first-ever National Security Memorandum (NSM) on AI, founded on the premise that cutting-edge AI developments will substantially impact national security and foreign policy in the immediate future.
🌍 Google announced a $5.8 million commitment to support AI skilling and education across Sub-Saharan Africa. The funding will equip workers and students with foundational AI and cybersecurity skills and support nonprofit leaders and the public sector with foundational AI skills.
🦁 In a significant development for wildlife conservation, AI-based trail cameras installed by WWF-Pakistan in the Gilgit-Baltistan region have successfully reduced conflicts between local communities and endangered snow leopards.
The AI Revolution in Content Moderation
TikTok, the global social media giant, recently announced a significant shift in its content moderation strategy. The company is laying off hundreds of human moderators, including a large number in Malaysia, as it pivots towards greater use of AI in content moderation. This move signals a pivotal moment in the evolution of social media content management and reflects a broader trend in the tech industry. TikTok promises better efficiency and consistency with AI moderation. Let’s have a closer look at what this really means.
Content moderation is the critical process of reviewing and managing user-generated content (UGC) on digital platforms to maintain a safe, positive online environment. By screening for and removing harmful, illegal, or inappropriate content like hate speech and graphic material, moderation serves multiple essential purposes: enforcing community standards, protecting users, maintaining brand reputation, and ensuring legal compliance - all while fostering healthy user engagement.
Under fairly recent EU regulations, major online platforms must report their content moderation decisions daily to the DSA Transparency Database. Since September 2023, they've logged over 735 billion content decisions. In a single day, moderators make millions of decisions about what content stays, what goes, and what gets limited visibility on your feed.