New Report Calls for US-Led G7 Forum on Social Media Moderation
WASHINGTON—To thwart the spread of disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms, the United States should establish an international forum for the Group of Seven nations (the G7) to develop voluntary, consensus-based content moderation guidelines based on shared democratic values, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading think tank for science and technology policy.
The report also recommends that the federal government support social media platforms in responding to state-sponsored disinformation by providing research grants and facilitating better information sharing, and ITIF calls on Congress to pass legislation establishing transparency requirements for social media companies’ content moderation decisions.
“Every election reminds us why content moderation is necessary, but the political debate over how to do it has become intractable because the Left and Right can’t agree on the nature of the problem,” said Ashley Johnson, a senior policy analyst at ITIF, who co-authored the new report. “Liberals want social media companies to be more zealous about taking down harmful content, and conservatives want them to show more restraint. Content moderation suffers from a crisis of legitimacy, and social media companies cannot resolve this issue on their own.”
ITIF’s report breaks down existing proposals to address political speech on social media. These take the form of free market solutions, legislative or regulatory changes that impact how social media companies do business, technical reforms that focus on incentives or requirements for social media platforms to make technical changes to their algorithms or services, and structural changes that involve extensive government intervention to change how social media operates on a structural level.
The report concludes that most of these proposed reforms won’t resolve core disputes—and several of the structural or technical changes that have been proposed for social media would likely make things worse for both content moderation and other issues impacting consumers.
To overcome political gridlock and polarization, and address the most serious problems on social media, ITIF proposes a three-part policy solution:
The U.S. government should establish an international forum for participants from the G7 to develop voluntary, consensus-based content moderation guidelines for social media based on shared democratic values.
The U.S. government should help social media platforms respond to state-sponsored harmful content, such as Russian disinformation and Chinese bots.
Congress should pass legislation establishing transparency requirements for content moderation decisions of social media platforms.
“The best course of action is not to shift the burden of resolving these issues entirely to industry or government but to bring together various stakeholders around solutions that foster trust, increase transparency, and mitigate threats,” said Johnson.
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The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute focusing on the intersection of technological innovation and public policy. Recognized by its peers in the think tank community as the global center of excellence for science and technology policy, ITIF’s mission is to formulate and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress.
