Content moderation online is a hot topic especially after the Christchurch Call, a New Zealand-France joint initiative to eradicate terrorist, violent extremist content online. At RightsCon this year, IGP is going to discuss the Christchurch Call and content moderation online during two sessions. Both sessions will be held on Wednesday 12 June:
Rafik Dammak and IGP co-organized the session about the benevolent accomplices of authoritarian regimes. The session will discuss how online social media platforms can have a role in increasing censorship by taking down content and suspending suspicious accounts. Moreover, laws and regulations that obligate platforms to remove content with no due process mechanisms in place also contribute to censorship online. So they are in a way accomplices of authoritarian regimes, using the same tool: censorship.
Censorship and online video streaming
Just a couple of examples can make the issue clearer: YouTube deactivated Wael Abbas’s YouTube videos of police brutality in Egypt, because the content was graphically violent, which were restored later after complaints filed against YouTube.
Google took down a number of Iranian YouTube accounts last year because they were spreading misinformation and were tied to the Iranian government. Iranian government approach to content moderation is more or less similar: Aparat is a popular online video platform (similar to YouTube) in Iran. Due to filtering, it has a high number of users. When entities critical of the government create channels and accounts on this platform, their account is suspended and deleted for a variety of reasons, one is spreading lies!
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