Comment by jibalt
11 days ago
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.