26 September, 2022

Thoughts on Internet Content Moderation from Spending Thousands of Hours Moderating Volokh Conspiracy Threads

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/09/25/thoughts-on-internet-content-moderation-from-spending-thousands-of-hours-moderating-volokh-conspiracy-threads/

It is a strange rule of human nature that most people who are moderated in an online forum feel, with great certainty, that they are being censored for their beliefs.  Few people think they just went too far, or that they broke the rules.  Moderation is usually seen as the fruit of bias. So liberal commenters were positive I deleted their comments or even banned them because this is a conservative blog and we were afraid that liberal truths would pierce through the darkness and show the false claims of conservatives.  And conservative commenters were completely confident that I deleted their comments or even banned them because we are liberals trying to prevent conservative truths from exposing liberal lies.  It just happened all the time.  Moderation led to claims of censorship like day following night.