In 2018, on the ocassion of the first Content Moderation at Scale conference in Santa Clara, California, a small private workshop of organizations, advocates, and academic experts was convened in order to work on the common goal of pushing toward the achievement of a more transparent and accountable moderation of user-generated content on digital platforms.
The group consolidated three principles, known as the Santa Clara Principles (SCPs):
1. Numbers – Companies should publish the numbers of posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their content guidelines.
2. Notice – Companies should provide notice to each user whose content is taken down or account is suspended about the reason for the removal or suspension.
3. Appeal – Companies should provide a meaningful opportunity for timely appeal of any content removal or account suspension.
In 2020, the Santa Clara initiative opened a call for submissions corresponding to assessments about the current state of the triad of principles. Among the guideline questions posed to contributors, there was the questioning of whether the SCPs should be ammended to include a new principle in regard to the need of transparency about the use of automated tools and decision-making in big digital platforms.
LAPIN has contributed to the open call, asserting the need to formulate a new principle, identified as the Explanation Principle, so that companies be able to provide users with clearer information about the automated processing of their data.
Check out LAPIN’S submission to the open call here:
