Three months of content moderation for Facebook in Berlin
sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de
sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de
The author describes having only a few seconds for a pretty complex task and is exposed to disturbing material for essentially their entire workday, without any adequate psychological training at all.
This is not how content moderation should be done at all, and I'm not even sure that this should be treated like a routine job.
You can automate it, but clearly that doesn't catch everything and automated systems can result in just as much bias as humans doing the job.
You can hire humans to do it and make them work fast, because the amount of posts per day is extremely high. You can use some automation to help them, but that will combine the problems of human moderation and automated moderation.
You can hire lots of humans to work at a normal pace and give them psychological counseling, and spend so much on their salaries that you'll go out of business, and even then they won't catch everything and will be frequently accused of bias.
It's a no-win situation for Facebook because even if they were able to objectively and fairly moderate every single post, they would be accused of bias by politically motivated people anyway.
This is not a technology problem, it's a social and political problem and Facebook will never be able to please everyone. Twitter is in the same boat.
Facebook is picking the quota for decisions per hour or whatever, and choosing whatever help is available to reviewers. Certainly they have some culpability for the outcome.
If Facebook adjusts the quotas, they will just be doing a more effective job at pursuing an unworkable goal.
Then you should not fucking be in the business at all! What FB does is externalizing the cost onto societies and skimming the profit!
Cost here being two things: first the cost of mentally fucking up the moderators (so an extensive amount of psychological healthcare has to be shouldered by society) and second the cost to society that arises from letting Nazis and jihadists spread their propaganda (including the cost from real-world violence enabled by said propaganda).
I wish Facebook had the courage to say this themselves.
Governments act like all tech problems are the latter, but I would like to know if this is like encryption that only friends can break (never), or like self driving cars (most people call it impossible until five years after it’s been demonstrated).
Especially in FB's case where it is quite obvious that various opposing "hate groups" have learned how to game the system, and also how to present results of that such that it supports their rhetoric.
No, it is merely extremely expensive. But that's something that you need to tackle head on when your business model is to provide a service for free to a large chunk of the planet's population. The 'free' bit doesn't absolve you from your responsibility as an operator.
Can you prove, or at least demonstrate strong evidence for, either of those two claims? “FB are noobs at propaganda” isn’t sufficient, IMO.
Facebook tries to get by with as few moderators as they can, with paying them as low as possible and generally trying to teflon away anything negative from their service (i.e. they negate being responsible for the fake news/hate speech on their platform).
I believe that there would certainly be a way to provide fair moderation - for example a ratio of 1 full time CSR (customer services representative) per 1000 users, not the 1 per 20k or worse they are currently trying to do.
That would require 2 million full-time CSRs, because Facebook has a little over 2 billion active users per month.
I'm sick and tired of Silicon Valley companies thinking they can save money on customer support and have societies pick up the tab.
And it's not like Facebook (or Twitter) couldn't get the money: 3€ per user and month should be enough to cover the cost of a properly salaried CSR - and at the same time create a barrier for bots and Nazi trolls.
What makes you say that ? Facebook barely makes $5/quarter (3 months) in revenue. They couldn't even afford $1/month/user. Meanwhile Twitter has never turned a profit ever.
Similar to how GDPR is going to gut the business model of firms who suck up all personal data and sell to the highest bidder.
How dare they?!
Unless they're obliged to by law, they never will. These companies minimize customer support in order to improve the bottom line, and will keep these at a minimal level - just barely enough to get away with that. It's one of the elements of the so-called "disruption".
I did. You should, it will improve your peace of mind. Also Facebook is a culture swallowing monster.
> No one owes you a business model
I don’t reslly care if FB doesn’t work at scale, if we put minimum responsibilities on them. They’re not owed that business model.
It's pretty understandable they're not able to moderate over 2 billion active users per month.
So that leaves two options: Either not have 2 billion active users, or not have any moderation. The latter is plainly unacceptable because, like others pointed out, it simply externalises the cost onto society. The first option, well I'm sure people will find other ways to communicate and plan events; It's not like their service is so unique, just the network effect and the size (which is way too big any way). We were long overdue for something better to come along any way.
There's no fundamental "right" Facebook has to do this, to keep existing and growing in the way they do, if all they want to do is grow but not take responsibility with the consequences of their size. Edit someone else said it better: No one owes you a business model. If a crucial bit appears impossible to "scale", then well tough luck I guess.
Hey, that's the Mastodon model! Relatively small independent servers with own admin/moderator teams responsible only for their own servers. That's scalable moderation.
[1]: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/7f81350fe4fe...
Are they, though? I feel that they are no more responsible than internet providers are for the illegal shit people do with their connections.
The fact is that society has always drawn lines about what speech and behavior is and isn't acceptable in different venues and circumstances. Facebook's choice to censor hate speech is no different from a bar, restaurant, or department store asking someone to leave for shouting the N-word at fellow shoppers. It's a private non-governmental entity making a choice about how they want their users to act on their platform.
Furthermore, free speech claims in favor of hate speech ignore the real material costs in human lives that facilitating hate speech incurs. While I greatly value free speech personally, I also greatly value human lives and the ability of all people to meaningfully participate in society without facing systemic oppression, violence, and hatred.
Tolerance must inevitably come face-to-face with intolerance, and if we don't act to stop the worst kinds of hatred and intolerance they fester and decay the ideals that allow tolerance to flourish at all.
Let's not be disingenuous: democracies also want to limit the speech of authoritarians. And they probably should, because every idea that's broadcast will garner some following. It's human nature. Your knife doesn't only cut one way.
Are they? Let's see the most important difference:
Is a public square privately owned? No. It is owned by the community, usually the council.
Is a restaurant privately owned? Yes. The proprietor has the option to evict people at will, as long as they do not discriminate against minorities in the process.
Do hate speech laws apply in a public place? Yes. If someone states racist things in public, they may be put in prison for hate speech.
Do hate speech laws apply in a private place? It depends on if this space is open to the public, and on the event being held. Generally, yes.
Is the owner allowed to evict any member at will from a public square? It depends. If the person is being harmful towards others, they may be removed from the square and detained, and sometimes even charged a crime.
Is the owner allowed to evict any member at will from a private square? Yes, as long as they do not discriminate against minorities when doing so.
As you can see, the attribute you have brought up does not matter. Facebook has the legal right to remove people for speech, as long as it does not discriminate against minorities in the process.
Many public squares are privately owned these days.
> Facebook has the legal right to remove people for speech
No-one is disputing that. Grandparent wrote "It’s a space where free speech should be defended," not "It's a space where free speech is protected by the law." The lack of legal protection for speech in this kind of space makes it all the more important that individuals stand up for it.
Free speech policies that would effectively harbor hate speech - also protect your speech from being labelled as such, and then censored, or worse. There are a disturbing number of places still left in this world, where controversial speech can get you jailed, or killed - with the blessing of, or by a government.
Humans can't be trusted, by and large, to be benevolent censors.
Speech promoting violence against some group of people, and not for defense purposes. No subjectivity there.
Of course, you may very well ask, isn't it trivial to construct an almost identical argument to justify violence against almost any particular category of people you'd care to name? Hopefully your interlocutor won't respond by punching you in the face.
> Furthermore, free speech claims in favor of hate speech ignore the real material costs in human lives that facilitating hate speech incurs.
What material cost? Censorship advocates continually assume that hate speech must have large and personal costs, but in my experience, present no evidence. The benefits of censorship are not apparent. The costs, however, are clear in the historical record: slowed scientific progress, emotional distress, and atrocities that might have been avoided through vigorous public discussion. And it's always been in the name of the public good, or saving souls, or protecting the innocent, or some other unassailable and noble good that people with power have forced others not to say certain words. The idea that no, this time, it's different suggests a certain historical hubris.
I'd wager that throughout history, there's never been a society that's made its people happier or better-off through censorship. I'd love to see a counterexample if you can find one.
For instance, the costs of censorship are, interestingly enough, also the costs of not censoring free speech. Slowed scientific progress (due to the rise of anti-intellectualism), emotional distress (pretty obvious how some types of free speech cause this), and atrocities (e.g. Charlotesville) could have been avoided through censorship. Those are the material costs of allowing unbridled, "hate group" free speech.
On a side note, I am very personally conflicted on this topic. It was strange to read your comment and strongly agree with some statements and then very strongly disagree other statements.
Then don't make it open. Make it auditable and tied to your public identity, not to an email address you can invent at any time. The OP is right, FB is making huge profits by punting the costs onto society.
It's not a complete recipe, but I feel it's a necessary condition. This is a big part of why HN is a polite place, or why most niche subreddits are polite places.
It's only when you deliberately want to attract (and retain) as many eyeballs as possible, then the quality necessarily has to go out the window.
You seem to be venting incoherently. How does that follow from the statement you're replying to, at all?
You seem to have an almost hysterical reaction to this story. Why are you so sensitive? Did Nazis and violence and Red Brigade terrorists and Communists and racists and Islamic extremists not spread their messages effectively before Facebook? Has the rate of violence from these groups increased since Facebook?
I don’t have stats in front of me, but I would argue that violence, terrorism and hate has decreased since Facebook. Sure we hear more about it now, but that’s a result of media penetration and not an actual increase in incidents. I would invite data that suggests otherwise.
One might argue that awareness of hate groups has increased because of Facebook thus leading to increased marginalization of their ideas.
Blaming the medium for the message is fascinating. The disease of hate and totalitarianism spread quite effectively before Facebook. We might argue that Facebook has actually reduced such things because it provides a marketplace where ideas can be evaluated and either accepted or shunned much more efficiently.
Banning the communication of ideas doesn’t stop the communication of ideas. We learned that from Solzhenitsyn. We should encourage more openness, less censorship. Sunlight disinfects.
No, but publishers should be, and they are. FB is a publisher, a distributor of content. They are not the creator of electrons or LED displays via which your content is distributed, which would be the closest analogy to your paper and ink manufacturer.
Your comment was downvoted a lot though. Must've hit a nerve :-)
Fake news on social media is subject to none of these controls. Facebook is a multiplier of some of the worst tendencies of human beings, and it lacks the institutions that the rest of society has evolved over centuries to contain those tendencies.
Facebook is, in part, a tool for distributing misleading information on a massive scale. We control tools that cause harm even if those tools are inert or even beneficial if they're not used by malicious people. Facebook has no institutional or economic reason to reduce the harm it causes, and it's the role of government to reduce harm when the market has failed to do so.
> The crazies finding each other and organizing is entire FB's fault.
If it is entirely Facebook's fault, how come this phenomenon predates Facebook and exists outside of it?
Do you see the problem with this argument? FB was rapidly accelerated the organization of these types of extreme positions. My original comment follows from my last comment. What do you think the crazies do when they've gotten all outraged at some false proposition or other?
That's not the right analogy. This is closer to what you said:
Human epidemics are entirely the fault of the great flu pandemic of 1912.
An even closer analogy to what you said is:
Human epidemics are entirely the fault of widespread transportation networks. Ergo we ought to abolish such networks.
Do you have any empirical evidence to back this "pandemic" claim of yours? Or is that just a feeling you have?
I'd go one step further - that's just consequence of better communication. You can't have one without the other. If you make life easier for everyone, you're also making life easier for the crazies, and for the bad guys. Personally, I'd still say it's worth it.
Original comment: You can hire lots of humans to work at a normal pace and give them psychological counseling, and spend so much on their salaries that you'll go out of business, and even then they won't catch everything and will be frequently accused of bias.
Reply: Then you should not fucking be in the business at all! What FB does is externalizing the cost onto societies and skimming the profit!
I still fail to see how that is a coherent and relevant reply. It comes across as shouting and venting rather than substantive.
Consider the original comment to be the first clause in an 'if-then' sentence, i.e. "IF the cost of hiring lots of humans to work at a normal pace and giving them psychological counseling causes you to go out of business, THEN you should not fucking be in the business at all, BECAUSE otherwise you are externalizing the cost onto society and skimming the profit."
So if it turns out that their moderation policy creates big problems for their employees and the world, thought should be forced to shoulder a financial burden in the form of taxes/workers comp.
All economic activity produces externalities, positive and negative. That doesn't mean we should increase taxes and subsidies on everything.
Which it isn't. Pollution is a well-defined term; you can identify particular offending substances or disposal methods by their impact on humans and their environment. There are precise things that can be taxed to discourage their use. "Fake news", on the other hand, is a pretty uniform spectrum, from the most blatant falsehoods to the stuff CNN and NYT write. It's hard to even agree on where to draw the line (personally, I'd draw the line at "journalism should begin and end at stating verifiable facts + opinions on those facts clearly marked as opinion", but that's an extreme/minority position), and there's no way to start quantifying impact.
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all—regardless of how bad another comment is.
Try thinking about a real solution to the problem next time that isn't "let's not do this".
(I do think that if Facebook is employing people to do something that predictably harms those employees then it should bear the cost of protecting them from those harms, and treating and compensate them when it fails to protect them)
They could hire 10000 people at 100k each. This would cost 1 billion per year making 3 billion every quarter.
You’re suggesting that the company should grow its headcount by around 40%!
Maybe in some cases it would, but we are far from being able to cure many psychological problems consistently.
2) Because zero-tolerance tends to result in over-blocking, and they already have a problem with banning content that shouldn’t be banned.
Also, what do you do if the hate speech is posted or linked to by a notable public figure, such as the President of the United States or a member of Congress?
> hate speech is posted or linked to by a notable public figure
Here's how I would approach it. Accounts that are tied to real identities have a much higher threshold for bans -- public figure or not. Sans a credible threat of harm to specific individuals they can largely say whatever they would like, hateful or not. When pseudoanonymous accounts get flagged their choice is to attach a publicly visible identity to the account or be banned.
If you think this is easy, you don't understand the problem.
Then maybe we need to place limits on their scale if they can't handle the problems their scale has created.
That seems quite unpersuasive, especially with no citations given.
Just off the top of my head-- email exists at roughly the same scale as Facebook. Yet those shady "fwd:fwd:fwd" stories do not propagate over email at anywhere near the velocity of the propaganda campaigns which saturate Facebook. And at the end of the day those "fwd:fwd:fwd" stories don't reach nearly the number of end users as the propaganda campaigns do because of the critical mass of email users unwilling to forward that crap on to their contacts.
Well there is no good approach to censorship, it's censorship after all, you will always piss people off.
People need to grow up, there is stuff out there that may dicomfort your world view but get used to it. Also only because you are deleting comments on facebook does not mean - at all - that you are tackling the cause, you just swipe the dust under the carpet.
Because people no longer use e-mail for private communication. I remember the times of "fwd:fwd:fwd" stories - they were popular before IMs and social media.
And let's not forget the ultimate, age-old source of "fake news" - a real-life, face-to-face conversation with a friend or family member that starts with "did you hear that $<fake bullshit news of the day>".
I'm thinking of the old talk.masked Tor onion service. Except near the end, there was zero censorship. But users could set their own filters.
And in the case of "Let the user choose the filters however they want", the business portion of the company takes on a massive risk. Remember this isn't a charity. Facebook wants to be able to make a lot of money and exist independently as an organization. Furthermore, they want to be able to predictably grow the business.
The reason I push back against your suggestions is because I see them often - solutions that swing too far into the realm of idealism and entitlement. Facebook is a business, so you have to be able to provide solutions that recognize the importance of the business side of things.
And yes, I am an idealist. As Crowley defined Thelema, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", and "Love is the law, love under will." The problem, however, is the haters. Burroughs joked about just killing them where they stand, and I suppose that's consistent with Thelema. But I can't see how it'd work in practice.
Mmmh. You do realise that the state of the art technology that you refer to was developed by Facebook, right? I mean, there are no public communications around whether and which type of image recognition is used to detect harmful content at scale for obvious reasons but… take a wild guess.
Do you _really_ think engineers at Facebook who love to solve problems at scale would prefer to have an army of contractors handle something hurtful if there was a solution involving smart code and a battery of servers?
One thing that, as a data scientist, I noticed: none of those reports complains about seeing the same image repeatedly. I understand that posters are often tempted to spread new content, so I would expect there to be many repeats. It could be because they see so many similar and shocking things they don’t recognise. Or companies could use techniques to pool together content that is identical or similar enough.
Therefore they contract it out rather than automate it? Your comment makes no sense.
I do not understand the lack of research in automoderation systems. This has now become a crucial point of social media! The most advanced system I have seen is 20 years old (Slashdot's moderation system) but now we are back to much more primitive reddit-like systems. Why did people stop explore these?
In a world where deep learning and blockchains are available through many easy-to-use packages I am surprised that there are not more experiments around that.
Alternatively, I bet we could find a way to use a middle out compression solution to make moderation problems smaller.
I usually point out that there is only one thing that the blockchain bring: it removes the need to trust a third-party. If you don't need that, then you don't need the blockchain. I would argue that political discussion in the current climate is one of the cases where the absence of a third party of trust would be an advantage.
- Micro-transactions to give incentives/disincentives to some behavior.
- Moderators team receiving compensation for their work
- Parties escrowing funds in case of moderation appeal
- A moderation implemented using smart-contract and not requiring third-party trust
- A multi-dimensional currency based on the cliques of reader who approved your messages much.
Please describe the exact mechanism by which a blockchain would be necessary for, or would enhance, any of these concepts.
Look at the fire twitter/facebook are under: Dems accuse them of serving Russian interests, Reps of being pressured by "deep state".
A blockchain-based moderation would be immune to this criticism, the data and algorithm being laid publicly, for all to see and check.
Content moderation is a pretty depressive activity to engage in for any amount of time. My biggest stroke of luck was to find a couple of community members that really enjoyed doing this and that kept a pretty fair hand or instead of a year ago I would have shut the whole thing down a decade ago.
That must be a rare type of person. Without casting aspersions on those two individuals in particular, I wonder whether part of a solution might be to invite the posters of objectionable comment to moderate others' content. Poacher turned game-keeper.
I would have absolutely nothing to do with the posters of objectionable content, least of all to elevate their stature to moderators.
We as a society have decided to hide the terrible aspects of our culture instead of deal with it. It’s why we have public and private schools, it’s why we give homeless people bus tickets out of our cities. We want to take the easy road and push our problems out of sight and out of mind.
I’m not saying I have an answer but the problem of Hiding from things that disturb us can’t be a long term solution.
But I don't think there is any pragmatic reason at all to watch torture videos that terrorists do. It is not a defense confrontation. It is the aftermath, it serves no purpose, nothing to learn there.
Regulatory requirements notwithstanding, a policy that dictates what content gets filtered to users is analogous to a parent forbidding a child from watching an age restricted movie.
Although I could present a "this is a slippery slope" argument here, the more salient argument is that content moderation is essentially a form of social engineering. If you think I am exaggerating but have never seen video footage of what _real war_ does to real human beings I would encourage you do so; consider then whether you still experience the same apathy that you did whenever "Suicide bomber in <place_in_middle_east> kills x" appears in your feed.
IMHO, people should at least be presented with the option to see what is getting filtered rather than selectively suppressing objectionable material lest society remain indifferent..
The other issue, which is perhaps more relevant here, is illegal content. Are you saying, for example, that it shouldn't be illegal for someone to put posters up on every street corner in their town saying that Mexicans are all child molestors and should be shot? Where should the line be drawn?
It would be inconsistent with the principle of free speech to sanction certain things from being said in public. Even racist, offensive and blatantly stupid bullshit (like your example) should not be censored.
The reason for this is because, paradoxically, if we assume that people are capable of rational discussion and debate they will eventually see where their beliefs or statements were in error through their reasoning.
To borrow my previous analogy, _hate-speech_ laws are akin to telling a child to: "obey; because I am your father" as opposed to people self-correcting their ethics through open debate and questioning.
I think it's pretty obvious that many people aren't capable of that.
Here is an interesting article related to this: https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/true-threat...
There is a mistaken assumption that hate speech is illegal. In the US, it isn’t illegal. Speech that contains a specific threat of violence would be illegal — but such threats have to be specific.
There is a song by the band Type O Negative called “Kill all the white people” and the first line of the song is “kill all the white people and then we’ll be free.”
That song is hate speech and promotes violence against white people — but it isn’t illegal.
Even speech promoting overthrowing the government is also protected as is speech calling for killing police or raping people.
Disgusting stuff sure — but not illegal speech.
Moderation doesn't create a civil online society any more than police create a civil society in real life. At best it reinforces the norms of the existing culture, at worst, it works against it to impose a cultural facade.
The difference is that one thing forms a community by the rules they set for themselves and the other thing tries to restrict the communication between people.
Which most people would agree is perfectly reasonable parenting. If there's an argument in here, I suppose it's that a content platform is entering into a paternal relationship with its participants. But that really isn't what's happening when it comes to the relationship between adults and participants on such a platform isn't a paternal one, it's more like guests at a house. Anyone would be perfectly within their rights and might well have reasonable justifications for controlling what kind of media or other expressions are welcome in their home or other environments that are under their stewardship.
There are drawbacks to limiting expression. Your example of the visceral impact of watching violence piercing apathy is a reasonable point. But it's equally reasonable to suggest that the apathy has other sources (there are other causes of psychological distance), that there are diminishing returns to explicitly portraying violence (most people already believe that killing except in self-defense is wrong), and of course there appear to be real negative impacts as discussed in the article.
> IMHO, people should at least be presented with the option to see what is getting filtered rather than selectively suppressing objectionable material lest society remain indifferent..
This is almost reasonable. The problem is that the material itself is only a primary concern. Secondary effects include encouraging other participants to doxx, engage in violent threats, etc. You're not just selecting material, you're creating a set of expectations for how civilized people are.
Perhaps there should be unfiltered forums; I certainly wouldn't stop anyone from creating one. But general social media platforms should probably reflect some norms of civil societies their members are drawn from, as well as whatever additional values their owners may hold.
I mean, do you think social engineering is bad? What do you think Public Service Announcements are for? Why do you think governments give tax credits to people who buy electric vehicles? Social engineering is a great tool when wielded responsibly with citizen oversight.
This surprises me, but it is consistent from Facebook's viewpoint where the user is the product. You can fire a customer, but you can't fire your product.
So maybe it is to be expected that Facebook implemented moderation as a QA process. It would probably be against their interests to implement policies that would police their community in a way that makes sense, with warnings, temporary and permanent bans etc.
On some level, money is morally neutral, but it's not like Facebook won't have enough "products" to sell if they dealt with those that violated their TOS more decisively.
> The moderator has not only to decide whether reported posts should be removed or kept on the platform but navigated into a highly complex hierarchy of actions.
I know we like to believe otherwise but an observation of human behavior en masse shows that we are preternaturally vicious. Extreme cruelty and violence is the default as much our need for connection and love. Those of us who've had the opportunity to observe or take part in humanity at it's most primal form, in the unsafe gaps between "civilization" and a well functioning state, often come away with our reality shattered. I know mine was.
Lastly, the author shows signs of PTSD, granted this is an armchair assessment.
And the size of the first group is somewhere around 150, the number of distinct individuals we can track mentally.
If you are doing something 1300 times a day you are effectively not doing it. I don't know what you call it, "Monkey in a can" comes to mind, but you are not adding any sort of human oversight or judgment aside from simple image recognition -- and probably not doing that good of a job at recognition at that.
I suppose these jobs exists so that the social media giants have somebody to point to (and fire?) when things go wrong. That's fine. Sounds necessary to me. But not at that scale. To attribute any sort of meaningful behavior to clicking images at that rate is a joke. Most normal people would be burnt out before they got to their first 100.
You know, like newspapers.
What do we really gain by having direct and immediate access to the uncensored thoughts of casual acquaintances and relatives and all their casual acquaintances?
Their benefits out weight their detriments. I'm just not a fan of amateur journalists with no oversight, poor training, an ideological axe to grind, and possible mental pathological tendencies.
How do you filter all that out? Ahhh, you can't. At least not without a cultural homogeneity that leads to strong social support for education and care of the less well off. How do you get that? Time.
What do we really gain by blog posts? I personally have learned a lot about technology from peoples' blog posts, and Stack Overflow posts. Maybe not as much from Hacker News posts, but I've still learned some. And by reading reddit posts such as stuff in /r/askreddit I've learned a lot about people with backgrounds quite different than mine, and I believe the ability to better empathize with them.
However, Facebook is nearly a wasteland of relatives and acquaintances yanked into the network, sometimes against their better judgement. Once their and fluent in the technical aspects they feel free to be themselves, not necessarily a thoughtful member of the network.
2. Reading this piece I don't imagine the system can actually "work" in any reasonable way. This job should be done by the individual user. In FB you can "block" other people. I imagine that would sort out much of this issue.
3. If FB and others are forced to police and censor like this maybe they should simply take themselves out of business lest they become inclined to exterminate our species for the actions of what, I hope, are a few.
The law is NetzDG http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42510868
Hacker news comments is a pleasure to read (A) because of the community, which (B) is curated by the ability to down vote horrible posts.
Facebook places value on these horrors, inadvertently I guess, but they are not empowering the users to shut down bad stuff. Imagine the possibilities.
Note that it was translated from English to German and not the other way around despite being about someone who works for a German company that does the "content moderation".
The person in this article mad themselves seem very objective and desiring to be fair, considering many angles... however I do not think someone can click to remove or not remove, thousands of posts / accounts a day and stay objective with all of them.
Projects I worked on have had facebook and tumblr accounts pulled, and I have found no way to speak with someone at either company about the issue. Given how similar the content looked to some standard spam, I can see how a moderator would quickly click to remove when they see hundreds of similar things a day that are indeed quickly made spam. However these particular projects were not affiliate spam, they were original works, however no amount of emails or @mentions on twitter ever brought anyone from these companies discuss the issue.
Had similar issues with google.
When it's just a fake account being used for trolling, the harm in removing an account is likely minimal. However there is little chance these low levels mods know if the poster was a troll of legitimate group trying to do right.
If presence on social networks affects search engine rankings, getting a low level overworked, over stressed person to delete your competitions accounts could reduce their sales by 80% easily.
As facebook seems to want to "be the internet" and monopolize what is okay to be discussed and seen, they certainly have poor customer service for righting mistakes that are made in removing things. This is also true of tumblr and others.
wasn't there something on hacker news a while back that pointed out many of these mod jobs or pushed to countries like the phillipines or something as well?
With the bias that can be created by culture, and the amount of content that people are forced to see, there should be better options for contacting these companies and getting things re-instated.
In some cases deleting an account hardly affects anyone. In other cases deleting an account creates a snowball of removing speech that may be important to many, not just on facebook, but affecting the other portals as well.
this overwhelming is human - we extrapolate from our experience what the world is "really" like - so a flood of beheading videos teaches you the world is fucked up. We as society do urgently need to get a grip on this - it's not just the extreme end but how skewed away from BBC-normal is the viewing diet of the average youtube kid?
I think there are solutions to the scale problem. the facebook brute force approach is interesting - but at 6.5M per week unmanageable.
I think this needs to be something dealt with as social media deals with everything - farmed out to the community. what we have is a free to publish environment. but we as society have really no insight in what is published - whereas previously there were few enough newspapers one could read it all.
so why not have an approach like recaptcha - every day or so you get a suspicious post in your feed, and are asked to comment. Feedback can be something like "95 of your friends think that post was offensive enough you should be jailed" - this would be valuable human level feedback that is not available in "likes". one can easily see it as a way to understand the different universes of people online - the fox-hunting lobby generally approved your post showing a bloodying but people who like superhero movies were revolted.
I can see the apple faceID thing here being an interesting measure of revulsion ...
Ultimately social media has been a consequence free zone for publishers (posters). By adding in feedback from friends and wider society we can get a much needed insight into what is happening around us, and the feedback will often be a useful control rod for people posting - as it is online.
Long unfocused rant but interesting thoughts.
One final thing - Berlin has sufficient immigrant population that it can recruit 1000 multi lingual multi cultural immigrants (plus churn - author lasted 3 months) with enough tech savvy to be moderators. Just want to mention that to the 52% of UK that think we can be a tech hub after telling all the immigrants to piss off.
This part really stood out to me. It made me think about the difference in my own reaction between reading about some number of deaths and reading about how the victims ended up where they did.