Think You Can Be a Content Moderator? Test Your Skills With This Game
A simple mobile-web game taught me a valuable lesson this week: Although I enjoy dishing out value judgments on social media, I don’t want to get paid to do it as a content moderator.
The game in question, Moderator Mayhem(Opens in a new window), is from startup-advocacy group Engine(Opens in a new window), which commissioned policy-gaming shops (yes, they are a thing) Copia Gaming and Leveraged Play to develop it for a specific audience. That is, policymakers suggesting or weighing proposals to increase the liability of social-media companies for either removing or retaining too much user content, who often seem unaware of how hard content moderation can be in practice.
The game puts you in the role of a content moderator for a fictional site called TrustHive, which lets people review anything—businesses, places, movies, politicians, whatever. Your job is to assess reports of alleged policy violations, and either approve the posts in question with a Tinder-esque swipe right or tap of a green checkmark button, or take them down by swiping left or tapping a red “x” button. And don't dawdle: Complaints about violations of TrustHive’s 18 categories of prohibited content keep coming.
Some of these are easy calls, like a “photo of the kettle reveals naked photographer reflection” description that calls out a violation of the no-nudity rule.
More often, the decision isn’t obvious. Tapping an eye-icon “Look Closer” button subjects you to a two-second wait but can surface useful content, such as when an allegation of a bigotry-policy breach (“Review of a club uses multiple racial slurs”) yielded this helpful detail: “The review is someone recounting how someone at the club shouted those slurs at her.”
Sometimes the rules don’t
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