Wed, Jan 13th 2021 3:38pm
Copia Institute
Summary: Running a site that relies on third-party content means having to deal with the underside of human existence. While most people engage in good faith, a small minority of people engage with the sole purpose of disparaging others.
Yelp is no exception. Designed to provide potential customers with useful information about goods and services, the site s popularity lent itself to brigading (negative reviews delivered en masse in response to current outrages) and the lowest common denominators of the general public: bigots.
The potential to ruin a business s reputation over their views on immigration policy, their employment of minorities, or other perceived slights made it possible for the most-respected review site to be weaponized by racists.
Fri, Jan 8th 2021 3:50pm
Copia Institute
Summary: Any site that relies on uploaded content has to be wary of hosting pirated content. In most cases, allegedly infringing content is removed at the request of rights holders following the normal DMCA takedown process. A DMCA notice is issued and the site responds by removing the content and in some cases allowing the uploader to challenge the takedown.
SoundCloud has positioned itself as a host of user-created audio content, relying on content creators to upload original works. But, like any content hosting site, it often found itself hosting infringing content not created by the uploader.
Wed, Jan 6th 2021 3:33pm
Copia Institute
Summary: Sexual content can be challenging for content moderation on a number of different levels especially when it involves fictional content about taboo, controversial, or even illegal activities. Literary fiction around these topics has been controversial throughout history, including books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which focuses on a story told (somewhat unreliably) by a middle-aged male English professor who becomes obsessed with a 12 year-old girl.
But while there have been widespread public debates about whether or not such written works have artistic merit or are obscene, the debate becomes different when such content is hosted on social media platforms, and raises questions about whether or not it complies with terms of service.
Wed, Dec 30th 2020 3:36pm
Copia Institute
Summary: During the somewhat controversial Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, there were a few moments that gained extra attention, including a confrontation between Senator Mazie Hirono and the nominee concerning statements regarding LGBTQ rights that Barrett had made in the past. Hirono, who had separately called the hearings themselves illegitimate, was then criticized by traditionally right-leaning media for what they felt was overly aggressive questioning.
The satirical site The Babylon Bee, which frequently targets Democrats for satirization, published a piece roughly parodying a famous Monty Python sketch in which villagers in a medieval town try to determine if someone is a witch, including by weighing them to see if they weigh the same as a duck. The Babylon Bee took that sketch’s premise and ran a satirical article claiming that Hirono demanded that Barrett be weig
Tue, Dec 22nd 2020 3:44pm
Copia Institute
Summary: Formed in 2007 and operated out of Limassol, Cyprus, xHamster has worked its way up to become the 20th most-visited site on the internet. The site boasts 10 million members and hundreds of millions of daily visitors despite being blocked by a number of governments around the world.
Being in the pornography business poses unique moderation challenges. Not only do moderators deal with a flood of both amateur and professional submissions, they must take care to prevent the uploading of illegal content. This goes further than policing uploads for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. Moderators must also make decisions with facts not in their possession about the ages of performers in amateur videos to prevent being prosecuted for the distribution of child pornography.