Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
On Internet websites that invite users to post comments, content moderation is the process of detecting contributions that are irrelevant, obscene, illegal, harmful, or insulting, in contrast to useful or informative contributions, frequently for censorship or suppression of opposing viewpoints. The purpose of content moderation is to remove or apply a warning label to problematic content or allow users to block and filter content themselves.
RollerCoaster Tycoon is a series of construction and management simulation games about building and managing an amusement park. Each game in the series challenges players with open-ended amusement park management and development, and allowing players to construct and customize their own unique roller coasters and other thrill rides.
NeoGAF is an Internet forum primarily dedicated to the discussion of video games. Founded as an adjunct to a video game news site under the name Gaming-Age Forums, on April 4, 2006 it changed its name to NeoGAF and became independently hosted and administered.
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. Created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua. For most of Roblox's history, it was relatively small, both as a platform and as a company. Roblox began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s, and this growth has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Techdirt is an American Internet blog that reports on technology's legal challenges and related business and economic policy issues, in context of the digital revolution. It focuses on intellectual property, patent, information privacy and copyright reform in particular.
ModSquad is a global digital company providing engagement services based in the United States. The company currently has over 10,000 moderators in its network. ModSquad provides managed, on-demand customer service, content moderation, social media, and community management services and teams across online, e-commerce, in-game, in-app, and social media channels.
Worms Ultimate Mayhem is a 3D artillery turn-based tactics video game developed by Team17. The game is a re-release of Worms 4: Mayhem with improved graphics. It features all-new content, story mode voice acting by Guy Harris, and other gameplay fixes such as reworked camera controls. The game features turn-based gameplay, a single-player campaign, and both local and online multiplayer. While primarily based on Worms 4: Mayhem, Ultimate Mayhem also includes content from Worms 3D, with its campaign and multiplayer maps included in the game.
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.
YouNow is an American live streaming broadcasting service where users stream their own live video content or interact with the video streams of other users in real time. The service is available on its website and on Android and iOS apps.
The Internet of Garbage is a 2015 non-fiction book by journalist and lawyer Sarah Jeong. It discusses online harassment as a threat to the useful functions of the internet and argues for new approaches to managing the issue. The book was reissued in 2018 with a new preface by Jeong.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
Walkaway is a 2017 science fiction novel by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow, published by Head of Zeus and Tor Books.
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free is a 2014 non-fiction book by the science fiction writer and Internet activist Cory Doctorow. In the book, he advocates loosening restrictions on intellectual property on the Internet. He states that "[i]nformation doesn’t want to be free,...people do.”
The Cleaners is a 2018 documentary film directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck. The documentary details the work experience of content moderators who have to decide which content needs to be removed by employing a moderation system for social media websites.
Bluesky, also known as Bluesky Social, is a microblogging social platform and a public benefit corporation based in the United States. Jay Graber serves as the company's CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and XMPP creator Jeremie Miller sit on its board of directors.
Lords of the Earth (LOTE) is a play-by-email game, first published by Thomas Harlan in 1983 during a growing era of PBM games. Initially played by postal mail, the game featured mixed moderation—computer moderated with some human assistance. By 2002, the publisher processed turns by email (PBeM). Lords of the Earth comprises multiple campaigns, each one a separate game. Campaign 1 is the oldest, set in the mid-1800s in the "Age of Air and Steam". Other campaigns begin from 2000 BCE to 1400 CE. Settings were global in scale, with one campaign featuring an outer space setting.
An Act Relating to censorship of or certain other interference with digital expression, including expression on social media platforms or through electronic mail messages, also known as Texas House Bill 20 (HB20), is a Texas anti-deplatforming law enacted on September 9, 2021.
Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton are pending United States Supreme Court cases related to protected speech under the First Amendment, content moderation by interactive service providers on the Internet under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and two state statutes passed in Florida and Texas that sought to limit this moderation. While originating with statutes in two different states, the Moody and Paxton cases are often discussed in tandem because the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to review them together.
Enshittification is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe a pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber and Unity. The American Dialect Society selected the term as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept.
