Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The Internet has become an indispensable part of people’s lives in the 21st century. People generate a staggering amount of data across major social media platforms, which is visualized in figure 1.1Lori Lewis, Infographic: What Happens in an Internet Minute 2021, ALL ACCESS (June 29, 2021), https://www.allaccess.com/merge/archive/33341/infographic-what-happens-in- an-internet-minute [https://perma.cc/6SYB-Z9SH]. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter allow billions of users to share their content freely. Not surprisingly, moderating the content and removing unwanted content, such as hate speech and graphic violence due to strong demands from both the government and society, is essential for these platforms. 2In 2019, a terrorist used the Facebook live stream to publicize his attack at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and murdered more than 50 people. In the first 24 hours after the incident, Facebook removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack, and more than 1.2 million of the said videos were blocked at upload by the content moderation system. Nicole Chavez & Madeline Holcombe, Death toll rises to 50 in New Zealand mosque shootings, CNN (Mar. 17, 2019), https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/asia/christchurch-new- zealand-mosque-shooting-latest/index.html [https://perma.cc/BBS4-NN4V]; see also Chris Sonderby, Update on New Zealand, FACEBOOK (Mar. 18, 2019) [https://perma.cc/ZA85- 2Y3X]. James Grimmelmann, the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, broadly defines content moderation as “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse.”3James Grimmelmann, The Virtues of Moderation, 17 YALE J.L. & TECH. 42, 47 (2015). Nowadays, global platforms like Twitter and Facebook rely heavily on automated tools to curate the information generated by users across the globe. This technology explainer provides a brief overview of basic content moderation frameworks, followed by an introduction of automated content moderation technologies, and a summary of their advantages and disadvantages.