On the Impossibility of Policing Social Media Content

Consider the following:

• A "Road Runner" cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote is first crushed by an anvil and then burnt to bits by an exploding box of dynamite.
• A "Three Stooges" short in which Moe pokes everyone in the eyes with two fingers and smacks Curly over the head with a frying pan.
• A security camera film from Latin America in which a would-be thief in a bodega is shot three times in the stomach, leaves a trail of blood on the floor, and falls dead in the bodega's revolving door.
• "Un Chien Andalou," the 1929 surrealist collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which opens with a woman, in close up, apparently having her eye sliced open with a straight razor (the eye of a dead calf was used in the making of the film according to Bunuel).
• An Instagram film of about 15 seconds length in which a series of toddlers scream their heads off until, from off camera, someone sails a slice of Kraft American cheese in such a way that it lands on, and adheres to, the tops of their heads, which immediately calms them.

Which of these films should pass muster on social media? The standards are different.  On X/Twitter, all of them would pass I think.  On Facebook, the first two would pass, and the second two likely not.  The last would be rejected, based on my own personal experience over the weekend, when I tried to put the clip on my Facebook feed together with a suggestion that I would try the "cheesehead" technique on my wife the next time she gets ornery.

And how would one write an algorithm that would rationally separate wheat and chaff here, taking into account historical and cultural context, the importance of preserving humor and sarcasm in a free society, and all of the other things that the courts have placed under the rubric of "redeeming social value" in judging, for example, whether pornography may be prohibited by law?  It seems to me impossible, but perhaps AI can tackle this challenge in our world to come like so many others.

I want to say (my overriding point really) is that it should be done, if at all, via the discipline of market forces, and most certainly not by the government, or else we will find ourselves on an Orwellian slippery slope of the most troubling kind.  This would be what you might call "a threat to democracy."