However, he also warned of the fallibility of these new systems, which are prone to bias and certainly capable of error, and the challenges they might pose to the Reddit model. Slowe also gestured towards the possibility of using AI to analyze images posted to the platform and conceded that a larger quantity of moderation actions will occur without human input as time goes on.
And that’s partly because it is always going to be somewhat grey and context-dependent.”Īsked how this situation could be improved, Slowe explained he is caught in a difficult position torn between a desire to uphold the company’s community-first policy and knowledge that there are technologies coming to market that could help catch a greater percentage of abuse.įor example, Reddit is already beginning to employ advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques to more accurately assess the sentiment of interactions between users. “The tricky part is that you’ll never catch it all. “There are a number of signals we use to surface issues and establish whether individual users are trustworthy and have been acting in good faith,” said Slowe. These staff members perform manual spot checks, but are also armed with technological tools to help identify problem users and police one-on-one interactions that take place in private. To catch any harmful content missed by the mods, there are the Reddit admins, who are employed by the company directly.
The company’s annual Transparency Report, which breaks down all the content removed from Reddit each year, suggests mods are responsible for roughly two-thirds of all post removals. The most common subreddit rule, according to Slowe, is essentially “don’t be a jerk”. The community mods act as the second line of defence and are armed with the power to remove posts and ban users for breaching guidelines or the content policy. However, while this process boosts popular posts and squashes unpopular ones, popularity is not always a mark of propriety.
The most primitive form of content vetting is performed by the users themselves, who wield the power to upvote items they like and downvote those they don’t. Unlike other social platforms, Reddit has a multi-layered approach to content moderation, which is designed to adhere as closely as possible to the company’s “community-first” ethos.
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