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When the Internet’s ‘Moderators’ Are Anything But
By Adrian Chen copyright The New York Times , 21/7/2015
Let us begin with a toast to the unsung hero of the social-media age: the moderator. Slayer of Internet trolls! Extinguisher of flame wars! Bulwark against race hatred and child pornography! The Internet as we know it could not exist without moderators, constantly pruning back the wild undergrowth of human nature that proliferates there. Nearly every major commercial site with user content is policed by human moderators. Some are unpaid volunteers who agree to enforce administrators’ rules; others are outsourced workers in the Philippines who flag dirty pictures posted to social media, or domestic employees who delete libelous comments. If you want to see what the Internet looks like without moderators … well, I’m not even going to tell you where to go, because we’d all be raided by the F.B.I. Let’s just say it’s immoderate.
Moderators are, by definition, forces for stability and civility in the raucous digital realm. Or that is, they’re supposed to be. Recently, the influential online message board Reddit was plunged into chaos by its army of volunteer moderators. It all started in early July, after Reddit abruptly fired an employee named Victoria Taylor. Taylor was well liked by Reddit’s moderators. She was the liaison between the company and its hugely popular Ask Me Anything section, where celebrities and other notable people answer questions from the Reddit community. Although unpaid, the moderators of Ask Me Anything approach their task more seriously than many people do their day jobs. Upset by Taylor’s disappearance, they shut down their entire forum, which gets millions of visits every day; this exploded into a sitewide protest, as dozens of other moderators locked down their forums as well. They wanted to give voice to their feeling, in one moderator’s words, that the company’s bosses ‘‘do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits,’’ as the individual forums are called………
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