Some Humility About Transparency

Abstraction: Practical trade-offs and costs in mandating social media transparency reporting

Key points:

• Transparency mandates should be flexible enough to accommodate widely varying platform practices; de facto standardization should be limited to the most essential data
• Key data categories per DSA: number of takedowns, appeals, and successful appeals — but each category becomes complicated in practice to define and measure
• Rigid transparency rules may drive platforms toward simpler, blunter content policies to reduce classification costs, worsening over- or under-moderation
• Transparency obligations add costs that may disadvantage small platforms and push them to accept acquisition by incumbents already invested in moderation tools
• Independent researchers need access to actual content involved in takedown decisions, not just aggregate numbers, to identify platform biases
• Transparency "budget" is finite — civil society should prioritize the most actionable disclosures rather than asking for everything

Connections: Stanford Internet Observatory · Facebook · Platform Transparency · Content Moderation

Source: https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/some-humility-about-transparency-5814cbbb1a72