Thomas Lebonniec for Nouvel Obs: Platform Moderators Are More Likely to Protect Users Than Digital Identity Controls
In a recent article for Nouvel Obs, Thomas Lebonniec and Neil S. question the
intentions behind a proposed law to ban children under the age of fifteen from
accessing social media.
Their argument is straightforward: protecting children online is a legitimate
and urgent concern, but age restrictions should not become a pretext for
introducing systematic digital identity controls at the expense of fundamental
privacy rights.
For the authors, identity verification is a strategy of obfuscation: by placing
the emphasis on users’ identities and ages, it risks diverting attention from
the ways in which platforms themselves produce and regulate harmful content,
while opening the door to forms of mass surveillance in the name of protecting
minors online.
Lebonniec instead calls on policymakers to take a closer look at data workers,
and more specifically at content moderators, the workers who put platforms
moderation guidelines into practice. Their work can help explain why some
accounts identified as belonging to sexual predators are not removed, why
potentially dangerous content remains online, and why harmful material can
sometimes slip through the platforms’ moderation systems.
This, in turn, means that legislators should pay closer attention to both the
moderation guidelines themselves and the working conditions under which
moderators apply them. These workers are routinely exposed to disturbing and
psychologically demanding content, often at the cost of their own mental health,
while being paid very little for work that is central to the safety and
governance of digital platforms.
Read the full article in French here