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Spandana Singh is a policy analyst with New America’s Open Technology Institute, where she researches and reports on policies and practices related to algorithmic decision-making, content moderation, transparency reporting, intermediary liability, and disinformation. She is currently also a Fellow at and the Vice President of the Internet Law & Policy Foundry, as well as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Esya Centre in New Delhi.
Singh was previously a Millennial Public Policy Fellow, also in the Open Technology Institute program, and a Cybersecurity and Technology Fellow at the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. Before joining New America, Singh was a Public Policy Fellow at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. She has also previously worked at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and UNICEF in Indonesia. Originally from India, Singh holds a B.A. in International Development as well as Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Content moderation trends in the MENA region: Censorship, discrimination by design, and linguistic challenges
Over the past decade, social media and communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp have emerged as important spaces for civil society, journalists, and everyday people in the Middle East to express themselves and organize. However, users’ experiences on these platforms often differ as platforms’ enforcement of their content policies varies by geography, language of use, and context. These flaws in the content moderation system can harm users residing in and around the Middle East, as well as those who use Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic.
The flaws in the content moderation system: The Middle East case study
Tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google have come to play a central role in questions of free speech, governance, and human rights in the Middle East. In particular, the question of content moderation — how platforms create and enforce policies which determine what kinds of user-generated content are and are not permissible on their services — has become a focal point of these discussions.
