RightsCon Tunis 2019

As social media companies have increasingly become gatekeepers of online speech, they have also faced growing pressure to provide meaningful transparency around their takedowns of content based on violations of their terms of service. In 2018, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were the first companies to finally start issuing transparency reports on their content moderation efforts. This strategic roundtable will survey the current state of this emerging practice and discuss how to ensure a robust future for content moderation transparency: companies that have already issued reports will share lessons learned in the implementation of their reports, companies that haven't reported will discuss the challenges they've faced, advocates and researchers will highlight fresh insights derived from the data and flag what additional data is still needed, and all will brainstorm new ideas for how best to expand the practice to include more companies and more innovative features, in a manner that will give policymakers and the public a meaningful window into platforms' content takedown practices. 2018 is the year that content moderation reporting finally became a best practice; we want to jointly strategize on how to ensure that it is standard practice by 2020.