social media
Content moderation online is currently done by most social media companies through a mix of automation (or what is sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence or AI) and human moderators. Automation deals effectively with certain kinds of content such as sexually explicit images, child pornography, terrorism-related content – but it is not a foolproof system. Here human intervention and oversight are needed, especially when it comes to the meaning of what is being said in comments or c...
Social media feminist influencers play an important role in reminding us offline and institutionalised feminists that the "who" in feminist movement building matters less than the "how". If there is something that we all have to admit, it is the fact that we have always had influencers. Less than 10 years ago we had political, ideological and yes, feminist influencers who too had followers; on listservs and mailing lists and academic journals where their ideas held what they thought were the ...
In June 2015, an organised online defamation campaign began against Iranian queer feminist and writer Shadi Amin. A website claimed that Amin had perpetrated rape, abuse, bullying and money laundering. The website was accompanied by a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an Instagram account, all of which replicated its claims that Amin was guilty of “documented cases of verbal, physical and ...
TikTok is a mobile platform for creating and sharing 15-second videos. Or as described by Wired, “a short-form monitised musical meme machine”. TikTok users lip sync, dance and perform to popular songs, dialogue or voiceovers from films and television shows and other audio clips from popular culture and edit the videos creatively using the templates and effects provided on the platform. It ...
On 15 March 2019 an anti-Muslim terrorist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 49. Christchurch is my hometown and I was quickly on the phone to family members, checking their locations, texting those in lockdown and watching with horror as the reality of what was happening unfolded before me. I thought of my APC colleagues in South Africa, India, Pa...
Commissioner Lawrence Mute Office of the AU Special Rapporteur Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A version of this letter was also addressed to David Kaye, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Dear Sir, We, the undersigned organisations that work to promote freedom of expression offline and online across the globe, write to exp...
Every 66 seconds a post inciting hatred against Palestinians was shared on social media platforms in 2018. Almost half a million calls for violent actions and racist slurs were registered. From all the posts mentioning the term “Arabs”, 1 out of 10 contain an insult or an invitation to violence against Palestinians. These are some of the revelations included in the Index of Racism...
The headline in a media report of 23 March 2017 says “BJP’s social media campaign in Manipur was a hit”. According to the report, the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) kicked off a high-pitched social media campaign in Manipur on more than 100 WhatsApp groups, a number of Facebook pages, Twitter handles and Twitter channels. This proves to be true considering the result. Comparatively, in the 2...
“So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is 'in the past.' This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.” These words from Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne Gay are more or less the exact words a victim of...
For the last few years, I’ve worked in different corners of what can be generally be dubbed as the content moderation industry. First as a contractor, then as an employee for well-known social media platforms, where day-to-day work is intimately linked to crucial social outcomes in different parts of the world. The decisions made in that industry can decide what counts as a real identity, the...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2019
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