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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

To me, the key part of this article comes about 100 paragraphs in. Describing the situation in 2014:

Facebook has a single Burmese-speaking moderator—a contractor based in Dublin—to review everything that comes in.

Burmese is the 43rd most popular language in the world, so perhaps it isn't surprising that Facebook was having trouble recruiting moderators.

http://www2.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/g101ilec/intro/clt/cltc...

It's a sad story. As much as I like "free speech" to be the answer, this is a pretty chilling downstream result of a platform not being able to do heavy human moderation.

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I don't get this though, even in the US how can you perform moderation at such a large scale? Should we moderate the whole internet as well? Internet was always moderated within each communities. If you have a forum, or a page, or a group chat, or whatever, then it's on you to moderate your community. The same is true for a church, or a volleyball club, or a school, etc.

How do you handle moderating your church that grew fairly rapidly to over a billion parishioners?

> As much as I like "free speech" to be the answer, this is a pretty chilling downstream result of a platform not being able to do heavy human moderation.

A net income of $23 billion in 2022. Meta is willingly not doing heavy human moderation; profit is more important than genocide.

There's no excuse.

> downstream result

You're suggesting a lack of heavy moderation results in genocide? I can point you to a million examples where that hasn't happened.

If the warehouse full of moderators don't show up to work one day, genocide doesn't therefore happen. The answer isn't slash 'n burn moderation at scale. A far better idea is good old transparency, raw information. No censorship, only improved contextual information, up and down screens, with accurate helpful facts and related info. It's proven to be useful and does actually balance false information right when it happens.

That's what you do to respect people, even those in need of educating and correcting from violent ways. They have internet phones, if it's not Meta/FB, it's something else.

>They have internet phones, if it's not Meta/FB, it's something else.

The article discusses the fact that Facebook was widely subsidized for users by exempting it from data consumption, which allowed it to out-compete other news apps. So Facebook actively marketed itself to the dominant position which is then defended through network effects. This was not a free market, and if a company is going to actively seek monopoly on information access then it does have a responsibility over that information.

Putting all philosophical arguments aside, the very simple fact is that Facebook could have helped prevent genocide.

> the very simple fact

If this topic were "simple facts", the main article wouldn't be more than 15,000 words over 2 parts. Would you conclude the "postman could have helped prevent crime" if only he had not delivered the mail?

> Putting all philosophical arguments aside

Why should we do that? Maybe Facebook is a victim. Their services were used for serious crime, in violation of their terms. The mobile internet is powerful. If any given community can't be trusted with mobile internet, that's not the fault of mobile internet. All the other concerns such as market dominance and cornering the market, are for sure dubious and sleazy in all the usual ways. But not "genocide level" unethical.

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