Let the community work it out: A throwback to early internet days could fix social media's crisis of legitimacy

"We see the pictures on the screen. You then go through the pictures and delete those that don't meet the guidelines. The daily quota of pictures is 25,000."

The man in Manila is one of thousands of content moderators hired as contractors by social media platforms - 10,000 at Google alone. Content moderation on an industrial scale like this is part of the everyday experience for users of social media.

But why should a few companies - or a few billionaire owners - have the power to decide everything about online spaces that billions of people use? This unaccountable model of governance has led stakeholders of all stripes to criticize platforms' decisions as arbitrary, corrupt or irresponsible. In the early, pre-web days of the social internet, decisions about the spaces people gathered in online were often made by members of the community. Our examination of the early history of online governance suggests that social media platforms could return - at least in part - to models of community governance in order to address their crisis of legitimacy.

Read at Nieman Lab