Beyond Moderation

Since the Social Media Governance Initiative (SMGI) launched in 2018, we have witnessed many of the biggest online platforms continue to face increasing challenges ranging from harassment and hate speech to misinformation. Over this time, many of these platforms have made stunning investments constructing massive content moderation apparatuses consisting of complex policies, sophisticated machine learning, and thousands of human moderators reviewing and removing millions of pieces of content. However, as these content moderation systems continue to mature, many of the issues they seek to alleviate persist. Recently, many have started looking beyond content moderation instead turning towards broader platform governance and design for solutions.

The SMGI/JC is hosting a two-day in person conference on Thursday and Friday March 30th and 31st, 2023 at the Yale Law School. This two-day conference will include presentations from a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and industry practitioners discussing their work exploring a range of issues of online governance. Attendance at this conference is by invitation only and we aim to have 40-70 attendees with a roughly even split between research scholars and industry practitioners. Our hope with the small size of this convening is to allow plenty of participation and discussion by attendees.

Please reach out to Matt Katsaros - matthew.katsaros@yale.edu - with any questions. A more detailed schedule of the days’ presentations and list of speakers will be provided closer to the conference.