Advisory

Harmful Content Must Be Understood From the Perspective of the Person Who Is Affected

Nov 2023 🇺🇸 arturobejar.org

Published alongside his 2023 Senate testimony, this essay sets out a taxonomy Béjar uses to categorize the range of experiences teens report as harmful online, from content that clearly violates a platform's stated policy to content that is merely 'toxic' or simply unwanted by the specific person who saw it. He writes that content clearly violating policy is a small fraction of what teens actually flag as distressing, and argues platforms should give teens tools to flag content as unwanted — with a stated reason — even when it does not violate any rule, and should use that feedback to adjust recommendation systems rather than relying solely on removing rule-breaking posts after the fact.

<1% of flagged content, clearly policy-violating

Béjar's taxonomy of teen-reported harmful experiences finds less than 1% clearly violated platform policy, with most of the rest falling into broader 'toxic' or 'unwanted' categories that rule-based review does not catch.

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CITATION

Bejar, Arturo. 'Harmful Content Must Be Understood From the Perspective of the Person Who Is Affected.' Supporting document, arturobejar.org, published with Senate testimony, November 7, 2023.

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