I’m optimistic that humans are basically good, and given the opportunity, can make rational decisions. Humans also want to have fun and be entertained. So a game with some forms of rewards is a good choice. I found the article about Facebook and it gave me an idea that I think is a solution to the problem of where to draw the line when it comes to content moderation and censorship of controversy.
Two quotes from this TheVerge article
https://www.theverge.com/21444203/facebook-leaked-audio-zuckerberg-trump-pandemic-blm
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“What we do is really try to not take a point of view,” the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told interns during a Q&A on July 7th. “I have a very strong point of view on this president. It’s a personal point of view. It’s one I hold deeply. It’s not one that should enter into my judgments when I’m doing policy changes. … We have to be a neutral platform, and make those decisions coming from a place of rules and principles.”
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>> During his July 16th Q&A, Zuckerberg sought to quell that criticism during his opening remarks.
“I think I’ve probably been the most outspoken CEO in the country against — on the many things that I disagree with this president on,” he said. “Whether it’s the immigration policies, which I think have not only been unfair but I think put the country at a huge disadvantage going forward compared to the opportunities that we should be going after. On climate change, where I think moves like pulling out of the Paris Agreement were a huge setback for the world. On things like his divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, that I’ve called disgusting — which I think was farther than pretty much any other corporate CEO who I’ve seen out there.”
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I’m watching the PBS Frontline “The Facebook Dilemma (Part 2)”. About the abuse of Facebook by hate groups and fake news, etc. I think it was Tessa ?? said, “This is not a problem you solve; this is a problem you contain.”
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Coming from a place of Rules & Principles
Sandberg’s last sentence about “rules and principles” shows that the Facebook boss is very controlling, afraid to let the users make any decisions about policy. They don’t want to democratize the Facebook platform.
The bosses don’t have to give up control of the platform. The bosses can establish ‘house rules’ for this Facebook user opinion censorship game that I call “Democratos”.
The user will be given a certain number of ammunition at the beginning of each day. The user can shoot them at any target; use none or all.
The target could be a controversial, polarizing statement. One example I recently saw was “Men are no good.”
The shooter might choose to change a pixel to the background color. The wise shooter would change a pixel in men so it becomes less and less visible. The males would eventually make men invisible. But the women would change the pixels back to their original color, keeping the Men. The wiser shooters would add two letters, ‘Wo’ in front of men to change it to women.😆
The house rules might be algorithms that determine how many bullets it takes to erase a letter or word. The algorithm could be logarithmic so that it takes many more bullets as the letter gets dimmer. The bullets might hit targets that change the background color or saturation. The house controls the accuracy and power of the weapons. Could be a BB gun or a mortar depending on the user’s traits. There are “big shots” in every organization. 👍
The statements would be censored if most of the bullets erased the important words. If most of the bullets restored the original words then the democratic will of the users would be upheld.
Scores would be kept so that the user could see what was happening with his ammo, how much other users were firing, the percent of users who viewed but did not shoot, etc. This would indicate relative importance to the users. There could be many levels depending on the user’s participation, score relative to the optimum, the maturity factor of the user, etc.
There have to be safeguards and protection against fraud and corruption. This might be accomplished by distributing control over a larger number of users, preventing accumulation of too much power. Privacy must be maintained. There are many other aspects that I don’t know about that need to be implemented. Democratos decision making game should be the will of the people, within the rules of a civil society.
Another Application
This same type of democratic decision making could be applied to the content moderators that do the censorship of reported items. The Democratos beta versions could be tested by these moderators before they go public. How many content moderators are there? Thousands? How about letting the users do some of the content moderation! Then eventually the users could train AI (artificial intelligence) to do most of the work of the humans.
The possibilities are many. The rationale is to provide the tools to the users and give the users the power to build a system that is doing most of the housekeeping work, and saving the most difficult decisions for the humans. The virtual system can do much of what the real world does.
