Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonshaev | Hacker News Reader

I don't love defending Facebook, but as of last year, they employed 15 THOUSAND content moderators (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-...)

Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people.

Again I hate to defend Facebook, but your comment is very misleading by ignoring that Facebook HAS hired humans to help solve the content moderation problem. A lot of them.

View on HN

The clear implication here is surely that 15,000 is not enough. Which is maybe not surprising when Facebook claims to have 2.85 billion active users. By that metric 15k isn't really all that much.

> Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people.

Maybe you could even argue that it's impossible. The question then is what to do about it. One answer could be "stop using recommendation algorithms you do not control", but that would harm Facebook's profits.

My guess (and this is purely a guess) is that it's "solvable" to within some threshold. But what is that threshold? I have no idea. If you turn the knobs too far, you'll presumably end up with more false positives. What's an acceptable threshold for false positives? I have no idea.

If you asked me 3 years ago, I would have naively answered that technology can do a much better job consistently enforcing moderation rules than our current technology actually can. Realizing how hard it is, even for "trained" humans, eviscerated that naivety real fast.

I definitely agree it's, literally, impossible for 15k moderators to accurately review anywhere near enough posts to get to whatever that acceptable threshold is. I'm also not convinced doubling that number is enough either.

There's always a certain arbitrariness and subjective interpretation in content moderation. Someone will always end up unhappy with the result.

Plus the number of moderators is irrelevant if they're trained to only remove posts from non-advertisers, or base their decisions on biased "fact-checker" articles.

Using algorithms to determine the order someone sees things in is, in my view, a social media company applying editorial content.

And therefore, if their editor (which is an algorithm for Facebook and Twitter) promotes something that’s slanderous or libelous, Facebook should be held to the same standards as an editor who could be prosecuted for that.

Same with someone who writes something on Facebook. Write something slanderous? You are like a newspaper reporter at this point. Facebook promotes it in the algorithm? Now their algorithm is responsible, too.

Facebook, nor its users, have any significant negative consequences for publishing anything that is false or misleading. Until that changes, I doubt the company’s behavior, nor individual posters, will change.

That's not a good analogy. "Editorial content" is authored by individuals working for or otherwise associated with the publication, this is not the case with Facebook where content is posted by individuals that have no business relationship to Facebook.

Your feed is not an innocent random sampling of posts and recommendations from the people and topics you follow.

Facebook does need to be held accountable for the damage done by promoting harmful content. They are externalizing grave costs in order to maximizing their advertising income.

Aren't those just the "disposable" moderators that have to judge whether an image is child/animal abuse, who work for a while and get burned out with psychological trauma? And they're mostly living in third world countries, so in the eyes of Zuck even more disposable?

Figuring out if a group is political or not needs the knowledge of political figures/parties, and the ability to understand the name of the group in its local language...

Yes, 15000 is a lot. But >2 billion people is a lot more. Wikipedia has far fewer people employed on content moderation yet they seem to fair just fine. This number throwing on Facebook "doing an effort" is an attempt to keep the toxic business model that they have a live at an acceptable rate. How many people would they save for hiring if they'd change the timeline into a chronological one instead of their current one? It'd be much harder to get as much attention than, but also less addictive, which is a net good for every human except for Facebook as a business.

Wikipedia has much less content

Yes. Perhaps that's a clue?

FB's groups are terribly designed if you want to have a conversation and keep a collection of useful information.

They're cleverly designed to keep people scrolling forever on a content treadmill - in no way the same as optimising them for usefulness.

I mean TikTok is the perfectly optimized content treadmill and compared to Facebook and people rave about how good it is. You forget that a lot of the value of social media is passive entertainment to unwind.

Wikipedia can also be “moderated” by anyone. If I see spam or incorrect info on Wikipedia, I can edit it myself. Maybe reword things, add references, etc. On social media (FB/IG/etc), I don’t have that choice. My only option is to report it and hope the moderators don’t say “this [x] doesn’t violate our community standards” on a clearly spam/scam account/comment/post.

I’ve reported so much garbage on social media only to be told it’s not a scam or whatever, I’ve practically given up trying.

I mean you can't really do that on Wikipedia anymore. Sure the edit button is there but there's the spiritual equivalent of a PR process now.

True; I’ve definitely had my edits reversed or challenged. But I’ve also made many edits that weren’t (mainly on more niche pages).

I agree it's not enough. I simply wanted to point out that Facebook, tacitly or otherwise, admits it's not a problem they can solve purely with technology right now (...without making massive changes to their platform that undercut their bottom line, as you said).

That being the case, it seems like Facebook in it's current form shouldn't exist then. It has no natural right to exist, and the harms clearly outweigh any benefits that could be argued.

> I don't love defending Facebook, but as of last year, they employed 15 THOUSAND content moderators

If all that discussions in Facebook happened in cafes, libraries and schools there will be way more "moderators" in that spaces. 15,000 is nothing for a business with 2.85 billion users. That is a little more than 1 moderator for each 200,000 users.

> I don't love defending Facebook, but as of last year, they employed 15 THOUSAND content moderators

Great. Keep going. They clearly need many thousands more - and they can afford it[0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earning...

Content moderation is only viable for small-scale communities, we're just yet to accept that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com