The Cellar - Censorship hurts marginalized people the most

The social medias have a problem: they really like having a lot of people on their platforms, because that's how you make money. But people hate each other when they are social, because they are humans.

That leads to bad press for social media companies. If people think your platform contains a lot of hate, advertisers will avoid you; and that puts your platform at risk, with billion$ at stake.

So you could ban hate, as if that were even possible; or ban hateful speech when you notice it. But when you have hundreds of millions of users, that is amazingly hard to do. You can throw ALGORITHMS at it, so you can detect "bad" speech, and ban it. But that leads us to a really horrible situation, where shitty AI is policing what we are allowed to say to each other. (That's a complete disaster, and will wind up royally fucking us; but that's where we are in 2019.)

TikTok figured out an easier and much cheaper way to avoid hate on their platform. They shadowbanned the users likely to ATTRACT hate. They just don't show those videos to anybody. PROBLEM SOLVED!

TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators

Quote:

The admission came after the German site Netzpolitik reported that TikTok asked moderators to watch 15-second videos and decide if the creator looked like the type of person others might want to bully. If so, moderators were instructed to add flags to the accounts of these “vulnerable” users. These flags would stop their videos from being shown to audiences outside their home countries and, in some cases, would even prevent their videos from appearing in other users’ feeds. A list of flagged users obtained by Netzpolitik included people with and without disabilities, whose bios included hashtags like #fatwoman and #disabled or had rainbow flags and other LGBTQ identifiers.

In the US, in the early days of television, "standards and practices" pretty much banned homosexuality on network TV. Well, that's actually how censorship works! We want to ban DANGEROUS ideas, but we wind up banning MARGINAL ideas. Who decides what is marginal? The majority, of course.