Automation and Human Labor in Content Moderation and Beyond

Date: Thursday, September 12, 2024

Time: 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Automated tools help online platforms engaged in content moderation address challenges related to scale, cost, reputation, and user safety. However, automation is ill-suited to address user-generated content that are nuanced, rapidly emerging, and context-dependent like disinformation, online harassment, hate speech, and extremism. Further automation depends on human labor. The impacts of both automation and human labor are felt differently across geographic and social contexts.

Join us for a robust conversation about the benefits and costs of automated content moderation and human labor, including how automation might be used in balance with human capacities for context and discernment, and with an insistence on accountability for human and environmental wellbeing. This panel will feature speakers from civil society, policy, academia, and Trust and Safety.

Webinar Panelists

Toby Shulruff (Moderator)
Toby works at the nexus of technology, people, and planet to build our collective capacity to understand, make choices about, and ultimately shape the technologies and systems that are woven into the fabric of our lives. She is a PhD student at Arizona State University, where her research includes the role of Trust and Safety work within technology companies, the privacy and safety of everyday and emerging technologies.

Farah Najar Arevalo
Farah is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS). Her research explores emerging urban technologies at the intersection of Development Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Metropolitan Studies.

Dhanaraj Thakur
Dhanaraj is Research Director at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where he leads research that advances human rights and civil liberties online. His most recent projects have focused on automated content moderation, the gendered and racial impacts of mis- and disinformation, and most recently he launched a new project examining content moderation systems in the Global South/Majority World. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Luca Jarone
Luca works at LegitScript, a technology and compliance company that performs monitoring for some of the world’s leading internet platforms, marketplaces, and payments companies. He started there nearly 9 years ago as an analyst, and now represents the company as a Strategic Account Manager. His journey and experience reflects a deep understanding of technology’s role in shaping industry standards, and how important it is to bridge the gap between compliance and innovation.

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