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November 2020
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Content Moderation Case Study: Using Fact Checkers To Create A Misogynist Meme (2019)

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Summary: Many social media sites include fact checkers in order to either block or at least highlight information that is determined to be false or misleading. However, in some ways, that alone can create a content moderation challenge.

Alan Kyle, a privacy and policy analyst, noticed this in late 2019 when he came across a meme picture on Instagram from a meme account called memealpyro showing what appeared to be a great white shark leaping majestically out of the ocean. When he spotted the image, it had been blurred, with a notice that it had been deemed to be false information after being reviewed by independent fact checkers. When he clicked through to unblur the image, next to the image there was a small line of text saying women are funny. And beneath that the fact checking flag: See why fact checkers say this is false.The implication of someone coming across this image with this fact check is that the fact check is on the statement, leading to the ridiculous/misogynistic conclusion that women are not funny and that an independent fact checking organization had to flag a meme image suggesting otherwise.As Kyle discusses, however, this seemed to be an attempt to rely on fact checkers checking one part of the content, in order to create the misogynistic meme. Others had been using the same image -- which was computer generated and not an actual photo -- and claiming that it was National Geographic's Picture of the Year. This belief was so widespread that National Geographic had to debunk the claim (though it did so by releasing other, quite real, images of sharks to appease those looking for cool shark images).The issue, then, was that fact checkers had been trained to debunk the use of the photo, on the assumption it was being posted with the false claim that it was National Geographic's Photo of the Year, and Instagram's system didn't seem to expect that other, different claims might be appended to the same image. When Kyle clicked through to see the explanation, it was only about the Picture of the Year claim (which was not made on this image), and (obviously) not on the statement about women.Kyle's hypothesis is that Instagram's algorithms were trained to flag the picture as false, and then possibly send the flagged image to a human reviewer -- who may have just missed that the text associated with this image was unrelated to the text for the fact check.
Decisions to be made by Instagram:
  • If the caption and a picture need to be combined to be designated as false information, how should Instagram fact checkers handle cases where that information is separated?
  • How should fact checkers handle mixed media content, in which text and graphics or video may be deliberately unrelated?
  • Should automated tools be used to flag viral false information in a way that might be gamed?
  • How much human review should be used for algorithmically flagged false information?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • When there is an automated fact checking flagging algorithm, how will users with malicious intent try to game the system, as in the above example?
  • Is fact checking the right approach to meme'd information that is misleading, but not in a meaningful way?
  • Would requiring fact checking across social media lead to more gaming of the system as in the case above?
Resolution: As Kyle himself concludes, situations like this are somewhat inevitable, as the setup of content moderation works against those trying to accurately deal with content such as the piece described above:
There are many factors working against the moderator making the right decision. Facebook (Instagram's parent company) outsources several thousand workers to sift through flagged content, much of it horrific. Workers, who moderate hundreds of posts per day, have little time to decide a post's fate in light of frequently changing internal policies. On top of that, much of these outsourced workers are based in places like the Philippines and India, where they are less aware of the cultural context of what they are moderating.The Instagram moderator may not have understood that it's the image of the shark in connection to the claim that it won a NatGeo award that deserves the false information label.The challenges of content moderation at scale are well documented, and this shark tale joins countless others in a sea of content moderation mishaps. Indeed, this case study reflects Instagram's own challenged content moderation model: to move fast and moderate things. Even if it means moderating the wrong things.


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posted at: 12:00am on 12-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Happy 20th Birthday To 'No One Lives Forever', The Classic PC Game That Can't Be Sold Today Thanks To IP

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There are a great many interesting arguments we tend to have over both the purpose of copyright law and how effectively its current application aligns with that purpose. Still, we are on fairly solid legal footing when we state that the main thrust of copyright was supposed to be to drive more and better content to the public. Much of the disagreement we tend to have with naysayers revolves around whether ever expanding rights coupled with protectionist attitudes truly results in more and better content for the public. We, to a large extent, say the current copyright bargain is horribly one-sided against the public interest. Detractors say, essentially, "nuh-uh!".But if one were to distill the problems with the current state of copyright to their most basic forms, you would get No One Lives Forever. The classic PC shooter/spy game was released way back in 2000, times of antiquity in the PC gaming space. It was a critically acclaimed hit, mixing Deus Ex style shooter missions, spycraft, and an aesthetic style built on 1960s classic spy films. And, as RockPaperShotgun reminds us, No One Lives Forever celebrated its 20th birthday this November.If you remember the game fondly, or perhaps if you never played it and are curious as to why there's so much love for the game, you might be thinking about going and getting a copy for yourself to play. Well, too bad. You can't.

FPS spy romp No One Lives Forever turns 20 today but alas Cate Archer is still confined to her room, unable to come out and play. The secret agent shooter has been tied up in legal gridlock for years. You’ll not find it for sale online aside from second-hand, but that hasn’t stopped RPS singing its praises all this time. A remaster still seems unlikely, but Nightdive Studios say they aren’t done trying to make it happen.
Legal gridlock is being extremely kind. Why you cannot buy this game is one of the most frustrating stories in intellectual property. We discussed much of this back in 2015. Nightdive Studios is a company that buys up the rights to older video games, updates and/or remasters them for modern gaming hardware, and then rereleases them. And we're talking about a professional operation that has managed to rerelease games like Doom 64, 7th Guest, and System Shock. In other words, these guys are legit and they know what they're doing.And they really, really wanted to give No One Lives Forever the treatment. There was just one problem: nobody seems to know who holds the copyright for the game, but everyone independently has told Nightdive that they'll sue if they make the game. Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Centry Fox all might own the copyright to the game, except that the paperwork for how the rights all shake out was contrived in a time before such records were digitized. So, someone owns the rights to this game. And Nightdive very much wants to work out an arrangement with whoever that someone is. But none of the three potential owners are willing to go hunt down the paperwork so such a deal could be worked out.You can get a sense of how each is communicating with Nightdive from our original post on the subject.
"So we went back to Activision and, [after] numerous correspondence going back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights, but that any records predated digital storage. So we're talking about a contract in a box someplace." Kuperman laughed. "The image I get is the end of Indiana Jones… somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision, maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed, they didn't have [their] hands on it. And they weren't sure that they even had any of those rights."
And yet Nightdive was also told by all three entities, independently mind you, that they might own some rights and would go find out if Nightdive tried to rerelease the game to see if they could sue over it. The end result is a game that can't be released legitimately to the public over rights three companies insist are important enough to sue over, but not so important that they should know if they even have those rights to begin with.Which brings us back to the RPS post, five years later on the 20th birthday of No One Lives Forever, where we find out that essentially zero progress has been made.
As one of the best FPS games on PC, it seems plenty worthy of a remaster or re-release, but efforts on that front have died in the water over the past decade or more. Hit any one of those quoted links to get the evolving story, but the short version is this: Nightdive Studios, who want to modernise No One Lives Forever, don’t own the rights to it. More than one company might have legal claim to it, but none of them are terribly motivated to unearth stacks of paper contracts literally hidden in basements. They’re just sure they don’t want anyone else making money off it without them. So Cate’s all tied up in the super villain’s lair without a Deus Ex Machina to save her.On that front, Nightdive recently told The Gamer that they aren’t done trying to make it happen. “It is a process that we’re continuing,” said director of business development Larry Kuperman. “We continue on with our mission to unearth and bring back these classic games.”
And so the public is flatly denied legitimate access to content that is a piece of our culture over copyrights nobody can say for sure if they have. I can't claim to crawl into the founding fathers' heads to say precisely how they wanted copyright to work, but it sure as shit can't be like this.

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posted at: 12:00am on 12-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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