LONDON (Bywire News) - Voice.com have announced the latest findings from their experiment in community reporting. The process which enables users to vote on content they find offensive is intended to offer an alternative approach to keeping the platform free from offensive materials.
With community reporting, content can be reported as being offensive. In cases which obviously break the law, the team will remove it, but other times, they will put it to a community vote. Users will see a post at the bottom of each piece of content saying it has been reported as offensive and can vote if they think it was or not.
Voice hopes this will fulfil their mission of creating an open platform controlled by the users rather than a major corporation in which false or abusive posts can be quickly removed. However, as with many new things, they are still trying to iron out all the glitches and have now updated their approach based on their findings.
1. Users need to be more informed
The approach so far is too much of a blunt instrument, so they will be able to select from a group of reasons to classify content for specific violations. This will ensure the community has as much information at its disposal as possible to help them make a more informed vote.
2. They want more data
So far, they say, sample sizes vary depending on what traction a post gets. They say they are now looking to get more input onto reported post without actually raising the profile of anything which might be offensive.
3. They want to bring the same function to comments
As we all know, some of the most abusive content on social media comes through the comments section. Currently, offensive comments can be reported to their trust and safety team, but they eventually want to bring the same community voting approach to comments.
This is still an evolving process, but at a time when social media companies have been accused of tolerating abusive and sometimes dangerous comments, online this project represents an important step in the fight against online hate.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klauda Fior)