AI-driven content moderation is subtly shaping public opinion and political engagement...
Authored by Paul Lancefield: Facebook make only about £34 a year from the average customer in the UK – a little under £3 a month (and that’s before costs) so clearly there is no head-room or motivation, for a human level of customer service or attention. The user is not the customer; rather, they are the product whose data is sold to advertisers.
Thus,
users do not have a direct customer relationship with the platform. The
network is not directly incentivised to “care” about the user before
the advertiser. And no matter where you lie on the spectrum between
“free speech absolutism” and “private entities have the right to censor
any user”, with such low margins it is inevitable machine processing
will have to be used to moderate posts and deal with the customer
interface.
But it is a fact the customer processing and management
capabilities Social Networks are now evolving is being utilised in a
variety of ways beyond just moderation. And it is also true this
automated processing is being done at scale and is now applied to every
post every member makes. 68% of US voters are on Facebook. In the UK
it’s 66% and France 73.2%. The figures are similar for every democratic
nation in the West. So it is vitally important the applied rules should
be politically neutral.
The power that exists within the ability to machine-process
every users posts is far deeper and more profound than perhaps many
realise. And while it can’t directly dictate what users write
in their messages it has the capacity to fundamentally shape which
messages gain traction.
Social Media services have become
de-facto town squares and most would agree their corporate owners should
avoid ever putting a hand on the scales and influencing politics.