A/HRC/38/35 explaining the selection of specialized flaggers, their interpretations of legal or community standards or their influence over company decisions. 35. Human evaluation. Automation often will be supplemented by human review, with the biggest social media companies developing large teams of content moderators to review flagged content. 108 Flagged content may be routed to content moderators, which will typically be authorized to make a decision — often within minutes — about the appropriateness of the content and to remove or permit it. In situations where the appropriateness of particular content is difficult to determine, moderators may escalate its review to content teams at company headquarters. In turn, company officials — typically public policy or “trust and safety” teams with the engagement of general counsel — will make decisions on removals. Company disclosure about removal discussions, in aggregate or specific cases, is limited.109 36. Account or content action. The existence of inappropriate content may trigger a range of company actions. Companies may limit content removal by jurisdiction, a range of jurisdictions, or across an entire platform or set of platforms. They may apply age limitations, warnings or demonetization.110 Violations may lead to temporary account suspensions, while repeat offences may lead to account deactivation. In very few cases outside of copyright enforcement do the companies provide “counter-notice” procedures that permit users posting content to challenge removals. 37. Notification. A common complaint is that users who post reported content, or persons complaining of abuse, may not receive any notification of removal or other action.111 Even when companies issue notifications, these typically indicate merely the action taken and a generic ground for action. At least one company has attempted to provide more context in its notifications, but it is unclear whether additional detail in stock notifications constitutes sufficient explanation in all cases.112 Transparency and notifications go hand in hand: robust operational-level transparency that improves user awareness of the platform’s approaches to content removals alleviates the pressure on notifications in individual cases, while weaker overall transparency increases the likelihood that users will be unable to understand individual removals in the absence of notifications tailored to specific cases. 38. Appeals and remedies. Platforms permit appeals of a range of actions, from profile or page removals to removals of specific posts, photos or videos. 113 Even with appeal, however, the remedies available to users appear limited or untimely to the point of nonexistence and, in any event, opaque to most users and even civil society experts. It may be, for instance, that reinstatement of content would be an insufficient response if removal resulted in specific harm — such as reputational, physical, moral or financial — to the person posting. Similarly, account suspensions or content removals during public protest or debate could have significant impact on political rights and yet lack any company remedy. Transparency 39. Companies have developed transparency reports that publish aggregated data on government requests for content removal and user data. Such reporting demonstrates the kinds of pressures the companies face. Transparency reporting identifies, country by 108 109 110 111 112 113 See Sarah Roberts, “Commercial content moderation: digital laborers’ dirty work”, Media Studies Publications, paper 12 (2016). Cf. Wikipedia: BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. Reddit moderators are encouraged to offer “helpful rule explanations, tips and links to new and confused users” (Reddit Moddiquette). YouTube policies (nudity and sexual content policies); YouTube Help, “Creator influence on YouTube”. Submissions by ARTICLE 19, p. 7 and Association for Progressive Communications, p. 16. See https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/971882517698510848/. Electronic Frontier Foundation and Visualizing Impact, “How to appeal”, onlinecensorship.org. Facebook and Instagram allow only the appeal of account suspensions. Cf. Github submission, p. 6. 13