Abstract

Algorithms for curation and content moderation are overwhelmingly one-size-fits-all, and the communities they act on have no say in how they work. Mainstream moderation systems routinely misread Black cultural expression and AAVE as toxic, and these systems subject users to opaque surveillance. This is both a human failure and a governance one. Blacksky, the largest community of Black users on the decentralized web, wrote its own community guidelines — and when it launched Blacksky-only posts, the scale of moderation required automating enforcement while staying true to its community ethos. This talk walks through the pipeline we built to provide automated content moderation that stayed true to Blacksky's community guidelines. Other communities can do the same, providing a view into the future of local, community-governed artificial intelligence. 

Speaker Bio

Rishi Balakrishnan is a founding engineer at Blacksky Algorithms. He leads development on Acorn, a product that enables communities to create virtual third places where they own their data, control the content moderation, and pick their own recommendation algorithms.