Pritzker Fellow Erin Simpson on "Human, Machine & Misunderstanding: Fixing Content Moderation As We Know It"

(Current UChicago Students Only)

Tuesday, May 10

3:30-4:45 PM via Zoom

Armies of invisible workers around the world are doing the low-paid, high-stakes labor of commercial content moderation. The unfathomable amount of content churned out on big social media companies has birthed a brutal industry of people charged with reviewing and removing reported content–violent, harassing, disinformative, pornographic, and otherwise. Content moderation is the last line of defense in grappling with mass disinformation online, a place where the contextual, subjective, cultural questions around political disinformation can hardly be grappled with in the seconds moderators have to review. For workers and social media users alike, the status quo is untenable. Today we’ll speak with Dr. Sarah T. Roberts about her pioneering research into the labor of content moderation and discuss the technical, policy, and cultural approaches to improving content moderation of disinformation and beyond.

Special Guest: Dr. Sarah. T. Roberts, Co-Founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Consultant for Twitter’s META group (Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability) & Author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Pritzker Fellows seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only. A Zoom link will be sent to your UChicago email address 60 minutes prior to the seminar start time.

If you have any questions about accessibility, please contact Ashley Jorn (ashleyjorn@uchicago.edu).