The murky history of moderation and how it’s shaping the future of free speech
This is a very good article and quite an eye opener.  As an internet&#x2F;web &quot;user&quot; for twenty years or so I&#x27;m familiar with the existence of &quot;moderation&quot;, but had only vague awareness of what moderators endured in that role.  Reminiscent of traumatized 911 operators, it would be unsurprising that a subset of moderators develop PTSD-like symptoms related to that experience.  Workers&#x27; comments quoted in the article lead me to speculate that there are significant mental health epidemiological questions re: current and former moderators.<p>An effective automated approaches will provide a big advantage in narrowing down the &quot;judgement space&quot; that must decided by humans.  To the extent that&#x27;s possible, the key benefit provided is reducing the exposure of moderators to stressful situations as the article describes, and indeed that&#x27;s a very helpful development.<p>As the article points out the whole domain of moderation practices is a minefield.  But now I wonder if there isn&#x27;t also a risk of automated review making classification errors re: user behavior. Plausibly automated systems can be tuned finely enough to avoid serious errors, and support human oversight to catch and more easily resolve edge cases.  Automated moderation systems will need to have such qualities in order to be able to reduce human burden as intended.