[throwaway94843]

Facebook has laughably weak moderation.

Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent.

In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war.

Then there are the 100k+ follower accounts that seem to get away with blatant incitement and rule-breaking, and Twitter is too afraid of a backlash to shut them down, even when they admit to having multiple admins (something that should disqualify them from the blue checkmark).

WhatsApp seems to be an even more pernicious vector of viral garbage...why it doesn't disable forwarding entirely (or forwarding to groups) remains a mystery.

It isn't an SV phenomenon: in another recent election, WeChat was used to spread fake electoral propaganda.

It may be time, for the sake of democracy, and stability in the world to "de-platform" the platforms entirely. The other option would be for remorseful founders to allow them to be swamped with spam (it might provide plausible deniability to shareholders), and be killed off that way.

[udfalkso]

Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?

[50656E6973]

That's true, but FB is not a "community" -- its a global mass mob consiting of billions of people. Even thinking about trying to moderate something at that scale is ridiculously impossible and disengenuous.

[debaserab2]

I think to this person's point, though – managing something like an online community is a microcosm of what social media platforms deal with, and if you've done it before you know how hard it can be to set the boundaries of acceptable behavior without finding yourself in spot that is viewed as hypocritical.

I can't think of anything harder than that to scale.

[zxcb1]

There are over two billion people on there. How about paying their users for finding and reporting content? A reputation system to find and pay trustworthy people to clean up. Thereby delegating the task back to the scale where it belongs, some money and incentives too.

[panarky]

I've been thinking about a online bounty hunter service to do exactly this.

Next step - how to prevent Sybil accounts created by the bounty hunters from generating new mal-content on an industrial scale for bounty hunters to identify for reward.

[udfalkso]

How do you decide who to trust?

[panarky]

"Move fast and break things" is all well and good until you build something so big, so pervasive, and so dangerous that you can't fix it without turning it off completely.