Unravelling A Regulation Machine

Fake News, Toxic Comments And 'Illegitimate' Culture

Abstract

Computational censorship in the form of fake news and toxic comments regulation is a subject that comes up quite often in the public discourse, as a result of the volatile political circumstances on a global scale and due to the unquestionable impact of journalism on these circumstances. Public attention has been directed to the role of mainstream and other media in the formation of public opinion, either in the form of articles or in the form of usergenerated comments. The purpose is to analyse and allow a deeper understanding of a project that is under development, namely, computational-censorship and to show that algorithmic regulation is not a solution, but rather another layer to a more fundamental problem.

This article examines the implicationsof developing Machine Leraning/Artificial Iintelligence (ML/AI) which aims to regulate the internet and we attempt to allow a glimpse into the technical aspect of the problem as a way to back arguments that could be re-jected by the ML/AI research community as “non-pragmatic”. Finally, it aims to highlight the absurdity of the current approach to research in this area, which is the exact opposite of the rationalism that the field claims to be embracing.