Especially with this approach of manual monitoring which will probably just result in more questionable deletions Facebook is already known for.
I've yet to hear of a way that this is solved without hiring thousands of people in what are horrible jobs (see Adrian Chen's excellent reporting on the issue[0][1])
I have no doubt that this will eventually be solves or assisted with ML, and that the solution is likely to come out of FB or G
[0] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-pro...
That experience really makes me feel bad for the 3,000 new hires, honestly. I couldn't imagine moderating the human condition, which one could argue Facebook basically is. They'd better not clean out Adecco, and actually pay those people with the long-term damage of the job in mind, but that won't happen. Would actually make for a good union...
We were a bit conflicted about what to do (more how to do it), and ended up reporting it to both the US and Australian feds (which I suspect may have given me a free pass on one of the crazier things I later did).
I really didn't take it well, but one of the guys in our group was inspired to start a vigilante group that would hunt these distribution networks down and it achieved some success in the 90s.
Hopefully these employees can be eventually protected with some basic level of ML that would filter out the worst of the worst (apparently Microsoft Research have a well-developed fingerprinting system for child exploitation images) - because i'd really hate to imagine the scenario you and Chen describe, and what I briefly experienced, as becoming more common.
Yes, they do - even when the post has nothing wrong.
Perfectly legitimate accounts writing reasonable posts, without any "fake news" content, or any "hate", are reported, and accounts are blocked.
This is a result of political activism by users. A very hard thing to solve for someone like Facebook.
Facebook is approaching 2B users. Let's say that every 1/1,000 users per day posts something that somebody else flags or which the system flags because of the words used. Then it's some 2M posts or comments that are flagged.
Facebook currently has 4,500 in the community operations departments ("moderators"). Each moderator then has to screen around 450 posts, which is difficult in an 8 hour shift. So obviously, that's not the way it works. They surely have algorithms that sort flagged posts with higher priority; more people flagging means it's more urgent, certain profiles are more urgent, for example people who have used violent language before, users with certain friends are more urgent, users at a certain age are more urgent, certain hours of the day are more urgent, post with certain words associated with violence or suicide are more urgent than posts with racist or sexist slurs or nude material etc.
But even if they correctly identify a threatening suicide or hate crime, how do they prevent it? Shutting down a live video is one way, but contacting authorities would probably also be necessary. How do you do that when your users are spread over 100,000 different jurisdictions? It's a big task.
If you count also their sister properties including FB Chat and WhatsApp and Instagram. But Facebook the social network hasn't 2B monthly active user, as many left or rarely return.
"Our community now has more than 1.9 billion people, including almost 1.3 billion people active every day."
[1] https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103696225640981&se...
The marketing campaign will be against murderers, the implementation will be against people who voted for Trump.
Conservative voters probably represent a much smaller portion of facebook's user base than liberal voters, given facebook's age demographics.
There is definitely an assymetry in what kind of hard-line political pages are likely to get banned. They have relaxed a bit in the last few months, but many political pages constantly have to worry about "getting zucced".
Lack of physical proximity to what is happen might lessen the urge to act. Pressing 'report abuse' is really easy, but calling the police based on online material is a lot harder.
Then wouldn't it make sense to add more people whose job specifically is to report criminal acts instead of relying on the users to do it?
Will they watch private streams and read private messages? That sounds like a privacy disaster even Facebook would prefer to avoid.
Which leaves them with reports from users. Basically, reviewing millions of "hate speech" reports and either effectively instituting a very strict speech code or ignoring vast majority of them leading to further complaints.