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Comment by uniqueid | Hacker News Reader

How do these mods avoid the disturbing material?

The information I've encountered on this topic is a pile of employees and journalists on one side painting a grim picture of life as a FB mod, and this one throwaway account on HN implying it's not so bad. Forgive me if I find that hard to believe.

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I was an early-ish Facebook employee, and started before they contracted out moderation. I once passed a content moderator in the lunch room, flipping through flagged images, about twenty per second. Presumably she was just reviewing user & automatic flags for accuracy.

What they see is: Penis. Pages and pages of penis. Penis in all shapes and sizes and orientations and conditions. But it was all penis.

Porn detection with Deep Learning is 99% solved problem, I bet those moderators only get to view content where the model reports lower confidence, the rest is automatically removed. The same for gore etc.

Think how many image posts and messages there are on Facebook and Messenger. Assume your Deep Learning model has 99.9% recall. It will still miss millions per day.

That's conceivably manageable if you're Facebook's size with tons and tons of moderators, while improving the data set.

Which is exactly what they do! For better or worse.

20 images per second x 8 hours a day is half million images per day per employee (quoted by gp, though its seem to be unsustainable), and Facebook has an army of content moderators so they probably manage somehow.

“Oh, look, a hot dog!”

Blind luck or maybe there isn't as much disturbing material on Facebook as one is lead to believe.

Your feed is pretty much posts from friends, groups, things you follow, and ads. If your friends aren't sharing old rotten.com posts and posting dick pics, it's probably pretty good.

It’s a numbers game. For every piece of truly disturbing material there are probably thousands of dick pics.

The barrier for entry to facebook is quite high compared to many other places on the internet, which probably helps!

That would surprise me greatly. In my online life I've seen stomach-turning troll content everywhere from Duolingo to bitcoin forums. But really, hasn't everyone?

Not really, no.

I actually only added that line as a postscript to not sound like I was making some kind of feeble boast. Ie: 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: racist memes on Etsy, animal carcasses on glassdoor.com...'

And I actually really wonder if other people see such things, because I really don't. Not saying they don't exist, but they don't seem to get pushed into my "timelines". What you could find if you were looking for it I don't know.

I've seen Goatse, though - maybe it's just that everything else pales in comparison.

Duolingo?

Duolingo had (or perhaps still has?) language forums. Duolingo used 'move fast and break things' moderation, and as a result there was a constant trickle of posts by racists and perverts.

Maybe some are more thick-skinned than others. After years of being on the internet and having seen all sorts of stuff I barely bat an eyelid nowadays but if you're not used to it I guess it would be more traumatising.

I think it's more a function of age. People in highschool or college can stomach more than older adults.

Younger adults don't shock easily because (a) they typically have less and feel less responsibility, (b) the thrill of breaking the rules tempers natural disgust at seeing edgy material, and (c) they have less life experience to have learned empathy for some kinds of people.

Of course, I might be extrapolating foolishly from my own life. I used to have more stomach for cruelty.

I remember well the times my friends used to send each other stuff from rotten. Not that I particularly enjoyed that, but I suppose it was part of becoming more mature? I liked the freedom of back then though, I feel like today's internet has become too politically correct

> natural disgust at seeing edgy material

Disgust is a cultural learning, not a natural response.

That's just... false. Disgust is a response we evolved to keep us from eating things that could kill us.

It's probably a mixture, but who knows. Chomsky and Skinner could probably debate it for several lifetimes.

It's actually both! Freakonomics did a great segment on the difference and the different types of disgust. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/disgust/

Fair enough. The point about aging that I had in mind doesn't change if we redefine 'natural disgust' as 'culturally taught disgust' In general, the older you get, the further you get from mum and dad dictating your behavior, and so the less enjoyable it is to, for example, be rude/crude for its own sake.

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