Infrastructure And Content Moderation: Challenges And Opportunities

Infrastructure And Content Moderation: Challenges And Opportunities

2 years ago
Anonymous $dRhNkMsRKr

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211004/11314147696/infrastructure-content-moderation-challenges-opportunities.shtml

The signs were clear right from the start: at some point, content moderation would inevitably move beyond user-generated platforms down to the infrastructure—the place where services operate the heavy machinery of the Internet and without which user-facing services cannot function. Ever since the often-forgotten incident when Amazon stopped hosting Wikileaks after US political pressure took place in 2010, there has been a steady uneasiness regarding the role infrastructure providers could end up playing in the future of content moderation. 

A glimpse of what this would look like came in 2017, when companies like Clouldflare and GoDaddy took affirmative action against content they considered problematic for their business models, in this case white supremacist websites that had been the subject of massive public opprobrium. Since then, that future has become the present reality as the list of infrastructure companies performing content moderation functions keeps growing.