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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

OK, 7500 people dealing with (according to the article) millions of reports every week. So let's assume 2M reports, the smallest number that counts as plural "millions". Assuming a 40 hour week and no breaks, this give FB 300K man-hours to handle 2M reports, meaning each person has an average of at most 9 minutes to view the content, investigate, make a judgment and take an action. Anybody who's worked in such a role: Is that enough time?

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This is a tremendous amount of time per post. A 6-7post/hr throughput is incredibly slow, unless their guidelines require they produce specific, rather than generated, feedback per post.

However, the actual number of people reviewing is unlikely to be 7500. A decent percentage of that headcount will be dedicated management, HR, analytics and administrative staff.

As another poster pointed out, you're assuming the reports are always unique, where in reality the number of unique instances/articles facebook has to investigate is going to be less than the number of times people report something.

Also 2 million isn't "the smallest number that counts as plural millions" - anything over 1 million is considered "millions".

Lastly you seem to be assuming that this is 100% manual and that each report needs to be treated as seriously as each other report. I'd imagine that at the very least these reports will be prioritized and if something is reported once by a user who reports 100 things a week, it will probably be ignored - giving more time for higher priority things.

The question is what '2M reports' means. If that means 2M reports are made by users, but they can be made on the same page/post/user, then they can be easily grouped. So, if you get 500 reports on a single post, the reports can be investigated in bulk and that would make the number of investigations smaller. I believe this is the case.

Nine minutes per piece of content would be _significantly_ more than any other company I've seen has given to reporting of user-generated content. I would also agree that unless it's a video, nine minutes is enough time.

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