Resolving content moderation dilemmas between free speech and harmful misinformation

Kozyreva, A., Herzog, S. M., et al. (2023). 

PNAS of US, 120(7).

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210666120

Abstract

In online content moderation, two key values may come into conflict: protecting freedom of expression and preventing harm. Robust rules based in part on how citizens think about these moral dilemmas are necessary to deal with this conflict in a principled way, yet little is known about people’s judgments and preferences around content moderation. We examined such moral dilemmas in a conjoint survey experiment where US respondents (N = 2, 564) indicated whether they would remove problematic social media posts on election denial, antivaccination, Holocaust denial, and climate change denial and whether they would take punitive action against the accounts. Respondents were shown key information about the user and their post as well as the consequences of the misinformation. The majority preferred quashing harmful misinformation over protecting free speech. Respondents were more reluctant to suspend accounts than to remove posts and more likely to do either if the harmful consequences of the misinformation were severe or if sharing it was a repeated offense. Features related to the account itself (the person behind the account, their partisanship, and number of followers) had little to no effect on respondents’ decisions. Content moderation of harmful misinformation was a partisan issue: Across all four scenarios, Republicans were consistently less willing than Democrats or independents to remove posts or penalize the accounts that posted them. Our results can inform the design of transparent rules for content moderation of harmful misinformation.

Significance

Content moderation of online speech is a moral minefield, especially when two key values come into conflict: upholding freedom of expression and preventing harm caused by misinformation. Currently, these decisions are made without any knowledge of how people would approach them. In our study, we systematically varied factors that could influence moral judgments and found that despite significant differences along political lines, most US citizens preferred quashing harmful misinformation over protecting free speech. Furthermore, people were more likely to remove posts and suspend accounts if the consequences of the misinformation were severe or if it was a repeated offense. Our results can inform the design of transparent, consistent rules for content moderation that the general public accepts as legitimate.

Discussion

Content moderation is controversial and consequential. Regulators are reluctant to restrict harmful but legal content such as misinformation, thereby leaving platforms to decide what content to allow and what to ban. At the heart of policy approaches to online content moderation are trade-offs between fundamental values such as freedom of expression and the protection of public health. In our investigation of which aspects of content moderation dilemmas affect people’s choices about these trade-offs and what impact individual attitudes have on these decisions, we found that respondents’ willingness to remove posts or to suspend an account increased with the severity of the consequences of misinformation and whether the account had previously posted misinformation. The topic of the misinformation also mattered—climate change denial was acted on the least, whereas Holocaust denial and election denial were acted on more often, closely followed by antivaccination content. In contrast, features of the account itself—the person behind the account, their partisanship, and number of followers—had little to no effect on respondents’ decisions. In sum, the individual characteristics of those who spread misinformation mattered little, whereas the amount of harm, repeated offenses, and type of content mattered the most.

The research is here.

Recognizing and Dismantling Raciolinguistic Hierarchies in Latinx Health

Ortega, P., et al.

AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(4):E296-304.

doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2022.296.

Abstract

Latinx individuals represent a linguistically and racially diverse, growing US patient population. Raciolinguistics considers intersections of language and race, prioritizes lived experiences of non-English speakers, and can help clinicians more deftly conceptualize heterogeneity and complexity in Latinx health experiences. This article discusses how raciolinguistic hierarchies (ie, practices of attaching social value to some languages but not others) can undermine the quality of Latinx patients’ health experiences. This article also offers language-appropriate clinical and educational strategies for promoting health equity.

Raciolinguistics

Hispanic/Latinx (hereafter, Latinx) individuals in the United States represent a culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse and rapidly growing population. Attempting to categorize all Latinx individuals in a single homogeneous group may result in inappropriate stereotyping,1 inaccurate counting,2, 3 ineffective health interventions that insufficiently target at-risk subgroups,4 and suboptimal health communication.5 A more helpful approach is to use raciolinguistics to conceptualize the heterogeneous, complex Latinx experience as it relates to health. Raciolinguistics is the study of the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of race and language and their intertwining in the identities of individuals and communities. As an emerging field that grapples with the intersectionality of language and race, raciolinguistics provides a unique perspective on the lived experiences of people who speak non-English languages and people of color.6 As such, understanding raciolinguistics is relevant to providing language-concordant care7 to patients with limited English proficiency (LEP), who have been historically marginalized by structural barriers, racism, and other forms of discrimination in health care.

In this manuscript, we explore how raciolinguistics can help clinicians to appropriately conceptualize the heterogeneous, complex Latinx experience as it relates to health care. We then use the raciolinguistic perspective to inform strategies to dismantle structural barriers to health equity for Latinx patients pertaining to (1) Latinx patients’ health care experiences and (2) medical education.

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Conclusions

A raciolinguistic perspective can inform how health care practices and medical education should be critically examined to support Latinx populations comprising heterogeneous communities and complex individuals with varying and intersecting cultural, social, linguistic, racial, ancestral, spiritual, and other characteristics. Future studies should explore the outcomes of raciolinguistic reforms of health services and educational interventions across the health professions to ensure effectiveness in improving health care for Latinx patients.

The info is here.

Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech

Kelly Servick
ScienceMag.org
Originally published January 2, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Finally, neurosurgeon Edward Chang and his team at the University of California, San Francisco, reconstructed entire sentences from brain activity captured from speech and motor areas while three epilepsy patients read aloud. In an online test, 166 people heard one of the sentences and had to select it from among 10 written choices. Some sentences were correctly identified more than 80% of the time. The researchers also pushed the model further: They used it to re-create sentences from data recorded while people silently mouthed words. That's an important result, Herff says—"one step closer to the speech prosthesis that we all have in mind."

However, "What we're really waiting for is how [these methods] are going to do when the patients can't speak," says Stephanie Riès, a neuroscientist at San Diego State University in California who studies language production. The brain signals when a person silently "speaks" or "hears" their voice in their head aren't identical to signals of speech or hearing. Without external sound to match to brain activity, it may be hard for a computer even to sort out where inner speech starts and ends.

Decoding imagined speech will require "a huge jump," says Gerwin Schalk, a neuroengineer at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies at the New York State Department of Health in Albany. "It's really unclear how to do that at all."

One approach, Herff says, might be to give feedback to the user of the brain-computer interface: If they can hear the computer's speech interpretation in real time, they may be able to adjust their thoughts to get the result they want. With enough training of both users and neural networks, brain and computer might meet in the middle.

The info is here.

How Trump’s Hateful Speech Raises the Risks of Violence

Cass Sunstein
Bloomberg.com
Originally posted October 28, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Is President Donald Trump responsible, in some sense, for the mailing of bombs to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders? Is he responsible, in some sense, for the slaughter at the Pittsburgh synagogue?

If we are speaking in terms of causation, the most reasonable answer to both questions, and the safest, is: We don’t really know. More specifically, we don’t know whether these particular crimes would have occurred in the absence of Trump’s hateful and vicious rhetoric (including his enthusiasm for the despicable cry, “Lock her up!”).

But it’s also safe, and plenty reasonable, to insist that across the American population, hateful and vicious rhetoric from the president of the United States is bound to increase risks of violence. Because of that rhetoric, the likelihood of this kind of violence is greater than it would otherwise be. The president is responsible for elevating the risk that people will try to kill Democrats and others seen by some of his followers as “enemies of the people” (including journalists and Jews).

To see why, we should investigate one of the most striking findings in modern social psychology that has been replicated on dozens of occasions. It goes by the name of “group polarization.”

The basic idea is that when people are listening and talking to one another, they tend to end up in a more extreme position in the same direction of the views with which they began. Groups of like-minded people can become radicalized.

The info is here.

A Lost World

Michael Sacasas
thefrailestthing.com
Originally posted January 29, 2017

Here is the conclusion:

Rather, it is a situation in which moral evaluations themselves have shifted. It is not that some people now lied and called an act of thoughtless aggression a courageous act. It is that what had before been commonly judged to be an act of thoughtless aggression was now judged by some to be a courageous act. In other words, it would appear that in very short order, moral judgments and the moral vocabulary in which they were expressed shifted dramatically.

It brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s frequent observation about how quickly the self-evidence of long-standing moral principles were overturned in Nazi Germany: “… it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.”

It is shortsighted, at this juncture, to ask how we can find agreement or even compromise. We do not, now, even know how to disagree well; nothing like an argument in the traditional sense is being had. It is an open question whether anyone can even be said to be speaking intelligibly to anyone who does not already fully agree with their positions and premises. The common world that is both the condition of speech and its gift to us is withering away. A rift has opened up in our political culture that will not be mended until we figure out how to reconstruct the conditions under which speech can once again become meaningful. Until then, I fear, the worst is still before us.

The post is here.

Talking in Euphemisms Can Chip Away at Your Sense of Morality

Laura Niemi, Alek Chakroff, and Liane Young
The Science of Us
Originally published April 7, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Taken together, the results suggest that unethical behavior becomes easier when we perceive our own actions in indirect terms, which makes things that we would otherwise balk at seem a bit more palatable. In other words, deploying indirect speech doesn’t just help us evade blame from others — it also helps us to convince ourselves that unethical acts aren’t so bad after all.

That’s not to say that this is a conscious process. A speaker who shrouds his harmful intentions in indirect speech may understand that this will help him hold on to his standing in the public eye, or maintain his reputation among those closest to him — a useful tactic when those intentions are likely to be condemned or fall outside the bounds of socially acceptable behavior. But that same speaker may be unaware of just how much their indirect speech is easing their own psyche, too.

The article is here.

How Should Psychologists Respond to Hateful Comments?

Samuel Knapp, Ed.D., ABPP

Director of Professional Affairs

Conventional words for ethnic groups vary over time, and what is acceptable for a group in one period of time would be viewed as offensive in another time or context. However, at times patients will use words or comments directed at others because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation that clearly offend standards of decency. How should psychologists respond in such situations? Should they ignore the comment or directly confront the patient about the terms that were used?

Discretion is needed to determine when a word is intended as offensive or not. For example, Hawaiians refer to European American residents of Hawaii as haole (pronounced “howlee”). At times it is delivered as a factual statement, “He is a haole” (a white person who lives in Hawaii), and European American residents of Hawaii commonly refer to themselves as haole. However, it could be used as an insult if it were combined with certain adjectives, voice intonations, or hand gestures (Rare storm, 2011).

The conduct of psychologists in addressing hurtful speech, as in other aspects of professional behavior, should be guided by adherence to overarching ethical standards. So, when a patient makes an ethnic slur, the response of the psychologist should be guided by the principles of beneficence (acting to promote the well-being of the patient), nonmaleficence (acting to avoid harming the patient), general beneficence (acting to promote the welfare of the public in general), or other ethical principles.

The context of the comment may be relevant. It is important to know if the comment is related to the patient’s presenting problem, or activated as a function of the perceived characteristics of the therapist (Bartoli & Pyati, 2009). However, I am aware of a few situations where patients have made such intense hate-filled and vitriolic comments (addressed towards groups represented by the psychologist) that a decision was made to refer the patient elsewhere.

In some situations the principle of beneficence (welfare of the patient) may be operative. For example, a young person may use an ethnic term in a manner that an adult considers offensive. Here it is most likely appropriate for correction or feedback because the person might not understand the implications or ways in which the words come across. An educational or non-judgmental exchange could help the young person understand the implications of this speech and how it might impair their social relationships in the future.

The overarching ethical principle of general beneficence holds that psychologists should act to protect the public in general. Consequently, it would seem that, according to this principle, psychologists should address hate-filled comments. However, this ethical principle should be balanced with concerns about beneficence or the welfare of the patient. One patient of mine made a derogatory comment about an ethnic group which I corrected, with as much tact as I could manage. The patient was embarrassed, apologized, and corrected himself. However, if the comment were made in the context of a psychotic episode, disclosure of suicidal intent, or other indication of serious emotional crisis, I probably would have ignored the comment altogether and focused entirely on the patient’s well-being. If the patient had made the comment in response to a particularly upsetting or stressful event, I might have deferred addressing the issue to a time when the patient could get more perspective on the situation.

It is often best to avoid assuming that there will always be a false dichotomy between general beneficence and beneficence. Except in extreme circumstances when patient welfare is at stake or when the hateful comments represent extreme social deviance, psychologists can often find a way to address the issue without harming the therapeutic relationship. Anger and judgmental attitudes should be avoided. Patients are more likely to respond positively to comments made in a calm and direct manner (e.g., “let’s use another word, it makes you come across as prejudiced”).

References

Bartoli, E., & Pyati, A. (2009). Addressing clients’ racism and racial prejudice in individual psychotherapy: Therapeutic considerations. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 46, 145-157.

Rare storm over races ruffles a mixed society. (2011). New York Times. Retrieved from here.