Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well | Techdirt

"while many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that’s misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well... not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing... But there’s a huge problem in that many people ... seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach."

Hence "Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem ... Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well ... will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone..."

Obviously, being moderated sucks for the moderated. One answer is Bluesky's approach, "pushing out the moderation to the ends of the network (i.e., giving more controls to the end users", but as we're seeing, "end users... have neither the time nor inclination to continually tweak their own settings". So even that is far from perfect.

But centrally managed moderation has bigger problems, IMHO.

"moderation is inherently subjective... many of the judgment calls will end up in gray areas where lots of people’s opinions may differ greatly."

There's no context, or the resources to absorb it all, so you need rules. But rules produce "crazy edge cases that end up looking bad".

And with big platforms, there's a lot on the edge: Facebook gets "350 million photos uploaded every single day... [with] a 99.9% accuracy rate, it’s still going to make “mistakes” on 350,000 images. Every. Single. Day."