Ratings System for TV and Films Is Not Expected to Work Efficiently for Social Media Platforms

The great pressure on new-era media platforms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and others to decrease the spreading of reactionary and illicit content on the services that they use is ongoing.

Surprisingly, establishing of third-party foundations in order to designate a standardization the distribution of unpleasant content and to inspect the companies which violate the standards has been requested by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Kevin Martin, then, has given a comparative example between  the rating system of Motion Picture Association of America(MPAA) and the proposed standard-setting organ in the following meeting with Axios.

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In order to eliminate excessive censoring by the goverment, an independent group, Classification and Rating Administration(CARA) was founded in 1968. It is in sight that CARA now has taken place of MPAA. Notwithstanding, authorities of CARA Express they many times cooperate with MPAA to raise the awareness of parents, and to enable their filmmakers gain creative perspectives.

Even though CARA endeavours maximizing their transparency, filmmakers sometimes are not satisfied with the ratings they get. Filmmakers are able to decide how to make specific cuts for the purpose of reaching more people. The biggest struggle of CARA is to ensure their filmmakers preserve creativity and to please parents in context of ratings.Impact of CARA also inspires other industries related to creativity comprising gaming, music, and television(both conventional and modern) encouraging them to embark on having their own rating systems.

There are doubts in MPAA model will work efficiently for the user-generated content(UGC) sharing/publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google and so, in spite of it is working properly for professionally-produced content releasing channels which are also reviewing their contents before releasing. Even so, the companies that are dominating the internet industry count on user generated type of contents which are almost impossible to audit before they are published. We also see that CARA is able to rate between only 600 and 900 films in a year while 720,000 videos are uploaded to Youtube in just one day, that would take 480 years to examine all contents with a simple calculation.

Ratings System for TV and Films Is Not Expected to Work Efficiently for Social Media Platforms

CreativeFuture says “The failure of Facebook and others to take responsibility is rooted in decades-old policies, including legal immunitiesand safe harbors, that actually absolve internet platforms of accountability”.As a summary, UGC delivering platforms are working sharply different than professional-production delivering environments on accountability. There is no need to be an oracle to foresee that CARA can never work as properly as MPAA does in a conventional way for the UGC-based platforms with the observations and tests we have in hand. Yet, it does not mean it is totally useless. CreativeFuture also states “Unlike the complicated work of actually moderating people’s ‘harmful’ content, this is cut and dried – it’s against the law. These companies could work with creatives like never before, fosteringa new, global community of advocates who could speak to their good will”.

While the developments are continuing, we will be following the process to inform you about whether it will exceed predictions or it won’t surprise us.

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