I'm Let's start with a very brief sketch of the history of content moderation.

Brief and subjective.

As far as I'm concerned, social media began in 2004 when I got my Facebook account in college.

From then until about 2010, content moderation involved one-page sets of rules and a few

moderators taking stuff down based on whether it made them feel bad.

Between 2010 to 2014, the rules in the process were formalized.

There were efforts to implement objective standards,

but things remained pretty wide open.

It was the heyday of the ISIS fan account. As the social psychologist,

Jonathan Haidt likes to point out, it's right around 2013 when the viral dynamics of social media

came fully into view. Soon after, platforms started taking more responsibility for the content on their sites.

Rumblings of change came with Gamergate in 2014.

Milo Ianopoulos was banned from Twitter in 2016.

Then there was the outcry over Russia's covert presence on social media during the 2016 election.

Alex Jones, Laura Lumer, and others were banned from Facebook in 2019.

And then came the earthquake, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

We've been arguing ever since about the platforms struggle to deal with the tidal wave of misinformation

surrounding those two events.

That's only about 20 years I just covered.

In that relatively short stretch, content moderation managed to go from pure vibes to the values of a few libertarian tech bros to real efforts at platform sanitation.

Meanwhile, social media itself went in the eyes of the public, from a dorm room fad to a beacon of tech utopianism, remember the Arab Spring,

to the cause of literally everything that's wrong with society.

...