To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.
Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.
Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff. They’re not paying $7.5 bil to just allow people to post whatever content they want now! Very quickly they will run out obviously clear-cut cases and will be moderating anything and everything under the sun.
How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic... I cannot imagine.
So what? If that cost is necessary to run a platform that is safe for those who are on it (= from spammers, catfishers, threats, pedophiles or right-wing extremists) and that does not serve as a breeding ground for threats for society (= "freemen"/"Reichsbürger" groups, militias, neo-Nazis, antisemites, Qanon, ...), then this cost should be paid by the ones making the profit (=Facebook), not society.
> Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff.
So what? The digital equivalent of police(wo)men on patrol. Just because it's The Internet, it should not be a free-for-all land.
> How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic
The US alone has nearly 700k police officers for 300M people, that are running around with guns and regularly kill people, and yet society accepts this.
Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that current user:moderator ratio is very obviously insufficient.
In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...
No society with numbers north of somewhere in the two digits works without some kind of rules, administration, and enforcement. I'll bet you there are at least half a million people staffing courts in the US, maybe even a full million, and probably an equal number of law enforcement officers, and that doesn't get to public and private attorneys which is probably another million.
Which means something like 1% of the population of the US is probably involved in just administering the laws of society.
Now, maybe for a society where the limits of how people interact is communication you could get away with lower overhead. But that's going to be a constant factor of the same underlying dynamic.
Also, we've done the same damn thing with freedom of discourse that we have with almost every other liberty in the US: we turn it into a thought-stopping cliche and glide on treating it as an indulgence rather than investing in thinking about the limits, edge cases, and responsibilities.
If all mods are routinely screening each other’s work, everyone has an incentive to be fair. Biased mod decisions are thus a risk to your continued employment because you know your work is spot-checked.
Fixed that. Maybe some nefarious three-letter agency found another way, maybe not. Even if they did, they have a powerful incentive never to let it be known. And it's still almost entirely algorithmic.
On the other hand, human moderators are inherently going to be entry-level individuals in a call center in a low-wage country. These are not the same things.
How would you feel about human moderation of your email?
But I do have to say that it is neither how the law works in many places, not is it ethically correct.