Content Moderation Beyond Platforms: A Rubric
Furnished content.
For decades, EFF and others have been documenting the monumental failures of content moderation at the platform level—inconsistent policies, inconsistently applied, with dangerous consequences for online expression and access to information. Yet despite mounting evidence that those consequences are inevitable, service providers at other levels are increasingly choosing to follow suit.The full infrastructure of the internet, or the “full stack,” is made up of a range of entities, from consumer-facing platforms like Facebook or Pinterest, to ISPs like Comcast or AT&T. Somewhere in the middle are a wide array of intermediaries, such as upstream hosts like Amazon Web Services (AWS), domain name registrars, certificate authorities (such as Let’s Encrypt), content delivery networks (CDNs), payment processors, and email services.For most of us, most of the stack is invisible. We send email, tweet, post, upload photos and read blog posts without thinking about all the services that help get content from the original creator onto the internet and in front of users’ eyeballs all over the world. We may think about our ISP when it gets slow or breaks, but day-to-day, most of us don’t think about intermediaries like AWS at all—until AWS decides to deny service to speech it doesn’t like, as it did with the social media site Parler, and that decision gets press attention.Invisible or not, these intermediaries are potential speech “chokepoints” and their choices can significantly influence the future of online expression. Simply put, platform-level moderation is broken and infrastructure-level moderation is likely to be worse. That said, the pitfalls and risks for free expression and privacy may play out differently depending on what kind of provider is doing the moderating. To help companies, policymakers and users think through the relative dangers of infrastructure moderation at various levels of the stack, here’s a set of guiding questions.
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