RightsCon Toronto 2018

Who chooses what you can say online? Social media companies and search engines are under growing pressure from governments, their user base to address the existence and apparent proliferation of pernicious online behaviour on their platforms such as hate speech, terrorist recruitment, and targeted harassment. In response, many public- and private-sector researchers are exploring engineering solutions that make use of machine learning to automatically filter and remove content.

This roundtable discussion will feature input from policy, social-science, technical experts as we discuss: What are the risks of this move to automation in communications governance? What are the underlying values we seek to preserve? And how can we better communicate with both the public and policymakers about these developments?

The overarching goal of the workshop is to build participants’ capacity to understand and engage with the complex topic of AI and communication regulation and develop projects for future collaboration. Participants will come away with a better understanding of the current technical capabilities and limits of automation across a variety of content and methods of analysis and a core set of risks and necessary safeguards to avoid the harmful consequences of thoughtless automation in content regulation. This roundtable will be a useful convening opportunity for free expression advocates, academics, and industry to share ideas and strategies for engaging with policymakers and the public on these complex and important topics.