Well, there are far too many posts made every second on social media for actual people to be moderating them all. Yet they have to be moderated for legal liability reasons. So these companies create algorithms that machines can implement, to screen for posts that violate the rules. If the algorithm finds something that looks suspect, instead of flagging it for review by a real human, the standard now is just to remove or suppress the post automatically, and the decision will only be reviewed by a human if the poster makes an appeal.
The problem is that the rules the algorithms use to remove posts are not known to the public, and don’t actually seem to conform to the publicly available “term and conditions” or “community standards” on many of these sites. Everyone suspects that leftist employees at the companies have cooked in some political bias into what should be an unbiased computer program. But the companies deny that, and as long as their algorithms are proprietary data, nobody can prove that they are using these things to push a political agenda without getting some court order to make them reveal the inner workings of their software.
Elon Musk has said that when he takes over Twitter, he wants to make the workings of the Twitter algorithm public.
“Elon Musk has said that when he takes over Twitter, he wants to make the workings of the Twitter algorithm public.”
If the algorithms banned users and that ban that violated Twitter’s TOS, could we see lawsuits against Twitter?
I’m guessing you’re not a lawyer, so my question may not be appropriate for you. So, just ignore me.