In a year that saw every facet of online life reshaped the coronavirus pandemic, online content moderation and platform censorship were no exception.
After a successful Who Has Your Back? campaign in 2019 to encourage large platforms to adopt best practices and endorse the Santa Clara Principles, 2020 was poised to be a year of more progress toward transparency and accountability in content moderation across the board. The pandemic changed that, however, as companies relied even more on automated tools in response to disrupted content moderator workforces and new types and volumes of misinformation.
At a moment when online platforms became newly vital to people’s work, education, and lives, this uptick in automation threatens freedom of expression online. That makes the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation more important than ever and, like clockwork, transparency reporting later in the year demonstrated the pitfalls and costs of autom
Access Now 17 December 2020 | 10:00 am
As we mark the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring,
we, the undersigned activists, journalists, and human rights organizations, have come together to voice our frustration and dismay at how platform policies and content moderation procedures all too often lead to the silencing and erasure of critical voices from marginalized and oppressed communities across the Middle East and North Africa.
The Arab Spring is historic for many reasons, and one of its outstanding legacies is how activists and citizens have used social media to push for political change and social justice, cementing the internet as an essential enabler of human rights in the digital age.
Many in the U.S. have spent 2020 debating the problems of content moderation on social media platforms, misinformation and disinformation, and the perceived censorship of political views. But globally, this issue has been in the spotlight for a decade.
This year is the tenth anniversary of what became known as the Arab Spring , in which activists and citizens across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) used social media to document the conditions in which they lived, to push for political change and social justice, and to draw the world s attention to their movement. For many, it was the first time they had seen how the Internet could have a role to play in pushing for human rights across the world. Emerging social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all basked in the reflected glory of press coverage that centered their part in the protests: often to the exclusion of those who were actually on the streets. The years after the uprisings failed to live up
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