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1/ Hey, I'm back. As we gear up for the latest on Online Harms, I've been speaking to criminologists. I've pulled together a paper to discuss, the idea being: we can learn an awful lot from how we police offline society wrt how we police online spaces. https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Everything-in-Moderation.pdf
Here's the pitch.
Policing by force offline is supposed to be a last resort, stop-gap measure. Outside of some nightmarish police state, we expect most social conflict, bad behaviour and so on to be addressed by a million things before the police get involved.
Communities, jobs, families, health services, religious institutions, teachers, friends, bystanders, norms, values, social anxieties and so on and so on. We intervene by force when something goes wrong, right?
As @rickmuir1 pointed out - deploying the police is a sign that something has gone wrong, not a sign that something is working.
But when we look online, it's different. The way we talk about online spaces, and often how we talk about regulating them, tends to end up being a conversation about blocks, bans, censorship, removal, takedown windows - force, in other words. It's not enough.
We need alternatives - the equivalents to all those things a few Tweets up. And thankfully they're out there!
Here's a League of Legends player in a Tribunal by their peers. The community is tasked with deciding whether or not someone should be punished.
Or this example of a (community!) moderator explaining why content is being removed, or a discussion being shut down, rather than just doing it arbitrarily.
The point is there we need to look at all the stuff that makes a space healthy, not just whether or not bad stuff is removed. At the moment the focus is on one tiny bit of the whole machine.
That's not to say that removing bad stuff is wrong. And in the case of illegal activity, illegal content, sure - fire away. But regulation these days is talking about far more than that: offensive content, harmful but legal, legal but only to some. Each needs its own tools.
(This image won't work, I guarantee...) And there are so many tools! Here are a few!
This is all part of the Good Web Project at @Demos - https://indd.adobe.com/view/3957f216-38f8-4eb5-a228-48ff539cbf45. Would love your takes.
