My latest piece tackles an old question: Why are social media platforms so bad at moderating antisemitic content? Today in Deep Shtetl, I offer three reasons you probably haven't heard, but explain a lot: newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
Why is this obviously antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and so many others like him, still on Twitter? I explain in my latest @TheAtlantic newsletter: newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
1) Social media companies lack the cultural competency to even identify most antisemitism. Because they don't know what the prejudice looks like, they are terrible at fighting it. newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
2) Social media companies rarely police non-American content, and most anti-Semitism isn’t American. newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
3) Social media companies tend to police content that embarrasses their executives in their own social and cultural spheres. Global antisemitism, like many other abuses around the world, doesn't come up at dinner parties, so it doesn't get attention. newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
An update on this story: Twitter has now taken down all the antisemitic tweets flagged in my post, thus proving my thesis that social media companies will remove such content when it becomes sufficiently embarrassing. The problem is that this is not a very good moderation system!
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