Wartime in the ‘digital wild west’
As Israel continues its advance into Gaza, the need for oversight and accountability around what appears on social media feels especially urgent. Forget for a minute all the stuff online that’s either fake or misinformed. There are reams of real information about this war that constantly trigger the censorship systems of Big Tech companies.
Consider the subject of terrorism. The biggest players all have rules against content that comes from terrorist groups or promotes their agendas, many of which align with national laws. This might sound uncomplicated, but the governing entity in Gaza, for instance, is Hamas, a designated terror organization in the eyes of Israel and, even more importantly, the U.S., home to the biggest tech companies on earth. Digital censorship experts have expressed well-founded fears that between Big Tech’s self-imposed rules and regional policies like the EU’s Digital Services Act, companies could be censoring critical information such as evidence of war crimes or making it impossible for people in the line of fire to access vital messages.
Although the stakes here couldn’t be higher, we also know that content moderation work is too often relegated to tiny teams within a company or outsourced to third parties.
Companies are typically coy about how this works behind the scenes, but in August the Digital Services Act went into effect, requiring the biggest of the Big Techs to periodically publish data about what kinds of content they’re taking down in the EU and how they’re going about it. And last week, the companies delivered. The report from X showed some pretty startling figures about how few people are on the front lines of content moderation inside the company. It’s been widely reported that these teams were gutted after Elon Musk took over a year ago but I still wasn’t prepared for the actual numbers. The chart below shows how many people X currently employs with “linguistic expertise” in languages spoken in the EU.