Social media platforms face an all but impossible challenge: generating standards for acceptable speech that transcend borders and apply universally. From nudity and sexual content to hate speech and violent material, digital platforms have tried to write rules and build content-moderation regimes that apply around the world. That these regimes have struggled to meet their goals, however, should come as no surprise: The global speech standards authored by online platforms are not the first time that tech innovators have tried to write global rules for speech. Unfortunately, the history of attempts to write such rules does not bode well for contemporary efforts to build global content-moderation regimes. From telegraphic codes to the censorship of prurient material, the promise of globally consistent standards have long been plagued by important—and to some extent inevitable—linguistic and contextual differences.
History explains why global content moderation cannot work (brookings.edu)
