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by cheetos 3238 days ago
The way to fix comments is clear: human moderators. Since this can't br automated (yet), Google doesn't do it.
2 comments

It's not clear. Human moderators are not the magic pill that fixes everything. Google has taken enough flak for injecting far too much liberal bias into their system and human moderators will only outrage more people. You may see it as righteous when opinions you don't like are swept off of websites you use. Everything is neat, tidy, and non-challenging to you. It's a bit Orwellian to me.
Google has an automated API in beta to detect toxic comments. I've been playing around with it and it works pretty well and could solve the human moderation problem.
I don't think human moderators are the clear fix at all.

Both Facebook and Twitter employ a large number of human moderators, and they still regularly make judgment calls that are comically bad - defending stalkers while suspending their victims, suspending users that are the target of coordinated harassment campaigns, etc.

The reality is that when you have an army of people who need to churn through a vast amount of content per day, without the time or authority to look at the full scope and context of user interactions, they will make lots of bad calls. Doubly so if the moderators live half a world a way and have little awareness of the culture and norms of users they're asked to evaluate.

Add this to the fact that the really obvious abusive comments can and are already being moderated by automated systems, it means the human moderators are overwhelmingly exposed to the trickiest, least cut-and-dry situations.

> defending stalkers while suspending their victims

or refusing to delete photos of women and their ex-partners when they've been killed by their ex-partners.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-3461822...