Rather than derail this thread, where I said that the big issue on the internet isn’t “woke moderation” it’s “inhuman, automated, black box moderation”, I thought that I would answer @TroutMan’s request for a cite or further argument, here.
Firstly, let me say that this opinion is largely based on my personal experiences and from discussions with others over the last few years.
In my own case, I wanted to advertise on Facebook. I applied and was rejected because there was a flag on my account. I have no idea why, I rarely post on the site, never posted any content that had been moderated in any way or was liable to ever be moderated. Mostly, I would share the occasional article about some scientific discovery of potential benefit to man, like more efficient battery technology. My best guess was that, as a developer, I had created multiple accounts on the site - years before they initiated the rule that you had to have a single account with your real, verified name on it.
I appealed and there was no response and I couldn’t get into contact with a human. A year later, I tried again and I pushed harder. After some months, I was able to get a moderator to email me back once saying that she was not allowed to tell me anything about my case.
Another year later, I applied and was accepted. I have no idea why. It’s still a giant mystery.
I know one professional blogger who does food-related content. Over the years, he has dealt with innumerable issues related to weaponized copyright infringement claims, having recipes removed from Facebook for mystery reasons (it didn’t like some word in the post?), and so on. I’ve seen reasonable, normal YouTubers discuss similar, random nonsense where the complaint isn’t so much, “How dare they!?” It’s, “I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fight this. I need to put food on my table and my content that has nothing to do with anything is being pulled down and I can’t even get a human to talk to me, to help me understand.” And I’ve seen how these sorts of complaints have pushed people towards the crazy, libertarian wing of the Internet where - otherwise - they might have stayed on the straight and narrow.
Likewise, I’ve spent dozens of years now on this particular website where we have actual, human moderators who talk to people, who clearly explain a person’s transgressions to them, allow others to comment, and work the problem through in a way that makes sense to everyone and feels fair to almost everyone.
I’ve lived my whole life in a country with police. They have to tell you what you did, they have to point to an actual law that corresponds to what they said, and they have to prove it in court. The police don’t lock you in your home, randomly, with no explanation and then let you go free a year later, also for no explanation. If they started to do that, I think we’d go from being as we are today and largely supportive of the police to, instead, having large groups of the population complaining about conspiracies and dark overseers trying to suppress them.
I remember an apocryphal tale that there’s a form of torture in military prisons where you make the prisoners dig a ditch. Then you have them fill it in, move over, and dig another one. When they work, they feel like there should be a purpose to it. They’re being made to work and do labor - and then to throw that labor away. If what they were doing was useful, it would be fine. But the capriciousness of it, the lack of meaning and the hardship of the labor involved in the doing is what ultimately breaks them.
Capriciousness is cruelty and it drives people mad. If there isn’t a human involved in the decision, if there’s no indication of what happened, what you can do to fix a problem, or how anything works - it will drive people into the hands of conspiracists and fear mongers.
