I’ve been reading “The age of surveillance capitalism” and the author posits that once social networks start censoring users, they become responsible for the moderation of the platform 

Today tech CEOs testified at Congress and it seems that majority of the senators want *higher* moderation on these platforms

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My q to the philosophy channel is how do you build an uncensored social platform at scale when there is harm such as CP, sextortion, scams, bots etc. 

In this context harm is subjective. I don’t mean harm = illegal. CP is illegal, sending 1000 $DEGEN and getting 10k back is a scam but not illegal. They are both bad.

Like so many things, I think this comes down to incentives, first and foremost. When your main business goal is to drive engagement vs. say, caring about your community, that’s a problem and it will remain a problem.

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I do think AI could provide a lot of help on the moderation front, but humans will still need to be involved. Many of the people that do moderation at this scale are outsourced companies, which is problematic in the sense that Facebook probably isn’t under any obligation to care much for those humans.

Casey Newton has done a ton of fantastic reporting on this that I highly recommend to anyone that wants to understand the moderation issues more deeply.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that moderation at the scale of Facebook and other similar social networks is extremely difficult and costly, both in terms of dollars and in terms of humans that are doing the moderation.