Comment by missmewiththatl
11 days ago
As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
11 days ago
As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
I agree with most, except the settlement is definitely not the straw that broke the camels back. Meta has larger contracts than that with smaller outsourcers.
Trust and safety is a cost center, and not valued in Tech.
Odd that your brain turned "one of the contributing factors" into "the straw that broke the camel's back".
In the before times, we used government regulation to enforce private company responsibility in accordance with authority.
If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).
If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.
But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.
Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.
I don't know why you're telling ME this, I'm just the messenger. But also it's quite confused:
> If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).
They did that. Then they decided to no longer do so -- "should" is a noise word. It's your opinion and clearly they don't care.
> If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.
Who are you even addressing? "Hey Meta, make money doing something else!" -- only in some bizarre narcissistic fantasy world does say such things have any effect.
> Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.
Um, yes. Now grow up.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.
Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
Meta isn't blaming anything, it's the process. And no process will be perfect, thats the 'damnd if you do/don't'
This is only going to be serious to people who care about the subject itself and maybe any actual harm done in those 90 minutes, which I see as nothing.
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they probably can reduce the error rate and triage false positives basically instantly with ai, but we all know how society feels about that
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
There's a big deterministic gulf between numerical OCR and judging whether a particular piece of free text is breaking TOS.
I think the best to measure the metaphorical size of said gulf is by studying outcomes empirically. If a technically non-deterministic system operates as precisely as a deterministic system does in practice, the rhetorical size of the gulf seems pretty small.
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Yes, no matter what happened Meta are responsible and should provide answers.
There’s still an important distinction to make though: if it was automated then the No Kings page was not deliberately targeted for political reasons.
Not targeted by Meta at least. I've heard plenty of stories of people getting banned due to other users flagging - and that's definitely an abusable vector.
Agreed, but Meta will never tell us if the action was deliberate, so we are reduced to guessing from shreds of evidence.