Why XHamster Is So Much Better at Content Moderation Than Facebook

For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute.

Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.

Not only that, the founder of xHamster doesn't claim they manually review everything: "We don’t allow just anything to be uploaded and immediately appear on the site. Our A.I. reviews the content for some violations or refers it to our team for additional review. We have had a legion of volunteers... who review uploads in exchange for in-site rewards, as well as the health of the community."

Also, this line from the article is blatantly false and shows they know nothing about how content moderation actually works at Facebook or other social media sites: "Although some links and words do trigger a basic moderation algorithm that prevents the update from being posted, most moderation is done post hoc, often after problematic content is reported by users."

Last I heard a lot of the haskell core team worked at facebook on Sigma (https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haske...). Everything goes through Sigma and while Sigma is primarily a rules engine there are also many sophisticated ML algorithms in the background as well. It's ludicrous to suggest that xHamster's "AI" is better than the haskell team's rules and ML from the people who created PyTorch.

Content can be sequestered for manual review. It doesn't even sound like xHamster pays anyone to do this. I guarantee Facebook pays hundreds if not thousands of people to review content already.

Facebook is just as culpable for underage images or video as xHamster. It processes payments so it's responsible for anti-money laundering. I'm sure there's a list of things it does regulate.

The issue is not with Facebook's technical ability or willingness to identify and sequester problematic content. It's all about what they consider problematic.

Making them legally responsible for bullying or hate speech is probably going to happen and may be necessary. But it's silly to make believe they don't already deploy extremely sophisticated technology, sequester content, and perform human reviews for all the things they are held legally responsible for.

YouTube is now up to 500 hours of uploads per minute[1]. Not that it makes much difference at this magnitude in this comparison.

[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/wit...

Isn't video moderation trivially parallelizable though? If one person can review one video a minute, then two people should be able to review two in a minute. And it's not like Facebook has such tight margins that there's simply no cash for this approach.. they just don't want to and nobody is making them.

It's stated in the article that YT/FB/whatever woudln't be able to grow as much as it did.

I was about to quote this exact passage. I flagged the article because its central argument is so specious. The writer gestures in the direction of scale:

It is true that a site like Facebook wouldn’t be able to reach a billion users, or provide those users with the same experience, if it adopted the same content moderation model as a site like xHamster

But the writer doesn't follow up on the scale of Facebook vs the scale of the comparison sites.

To have an opinion on the Internet, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

I don't think it flies well with the typical XHamster user either to be perfectly honest. People seem to actively prefer posting to other competing sites precisely because they don't have to wait hours or days for their videos to go live. (It's pretty much the only such site which this kind of slow pre-moderation as far as I know.)

It wouldn't be impossible to do faster moderation in these cases. People usually take a bit of time between completion of a post and submission, where you could run basic moderation checks.

Sure, but that changes nothing about the central argument that such restrictions would not stop social media platforms from thriving.

Hopefully you weren't at work.

"Dogmeat12, can I see you over in the HR Director's office immediately?

-Your Manager"