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Comment by sgregnt | Hacker News Reader

If more people would automatically solve the problem, it would already be solved. Facebook hires like crazy, and it's integrity org is massive...

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>integrity org is massive

Because the userbase is so ludicrously big "Massive" doesn't really convey the level of staffing in relative terms.

How many posts does the network have per moderator-workday?

This is the question to people who accuse facebook of negligence. It's basically guilty unless proven innocent. But why not switch the roles?

What is the number for integrity, that you think would solve the problem and why? how so this compares to other companies and facebook. Luckily we have so many social networks we can do statistics?

And then, vefore you know this, and the problem at hand, maybe you should suspend your harsh judgment?

To answer my own question, apparently this Dublin-based, outsourced moderator does around 100 tickets a day. The work is psychologically scarring:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57088382

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...

>...15,000 people whom Facebook has said it has hired to inspect its posts.

IMO, that does not it really answer anything. It's just one date point.

How many similar contractors are there, say what about India?

Another thing, the moderation is a combination of ml technique and human, the next question is how much load ML takes a way from human operator. How efficient are their tools?

What is recall and precision of removing violent content?

How does this compare with other social networks?

How much moderation is done organically by users?

i know first hand that facebook has tried repeatedly to solve problems with computers they KNOW can be solved by humans, but humans are more expensive.

its about money, not the lack of ability.

Everything is about money. If you yourself is middle class in a western country. Than you can sell your house buy a smaller one and buy back a few women that are now sold to slavery, or donate money to orgs that fight this, give me good reason why you do not do this?

Ah, ok - but - then, do employees actually have the mandate to change anything? I have seen a few articles that basically seem to indicate the only way that things change are because of whistleblowers or investigations. Doesn't sound very proactive.

It is very well known within the industry that facebook employees have a lot of power to change things: "Move fast and break things", "be bold" etc.. It is very open and democratic company. I'd guess that employees at facebook have much more power than say in google, let alone in apple.

How massive? Like actual Amazon delivery/warehouse workforce sized massive? Or just a small org?

I'm gonna assume the latter. And forget about 'massive', they clearly don't even want to hire enough to make it decently large.

Tech companies are fine hiring people when they can't just push the costs (social and monetary) onto others. But Facebook thinks it can - so it is.

I haven't actually gone through the math, but my gut tells me the amount of human moderation that would make people happy, basically having a human look at every potentially bad post, is so high that Facebook wouldn't be profitable. The only company that's solved moderation at scale is Reddit. It punted the problem to unpaid moderators, so Reddit only needs to moderate the existence of subreddits, not posts.

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