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by perkee 2540 days ago
too many of us work for companies willing to support this. We workers could put pressure on our employers not to. In fact, maybe we have to.
1 comments

Just because there's a private Facebook group does not mean Facebook supports it.

I imagine there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of private groups. Should Facebook hire hundreds of thousands of employees to monitor every post and every comment posted in every single group? That simply isn't practical and the technology simply does not exist to do it via software.

A video appeared in my feed last week of a woman 'deep throating' a banana in an extremely sexual fashion, the video lasted more than a minute. I reported it and went to her page, there was also one of her doing the same with a cucumber. I reported it. The next day I got the notification that facebook had reviewed the posts, did not go against community standards, I could block her if I wanted blah blah.

I reported them again. Three days later, I got a notification that the cucumber post violated community standards and had been removed however the far more sexual cucumber video was yet again found to fall within community standards.. if they can't even reliably remove a video of a woman vigorously, intentionally sexually, fellating produce in her car with very sexual commentary in public posts with millions of views... how are they supposed to police every single post in every single private group?

There was an article posted on HN recently (no time to track it down) but the thing that struck me about it was; the content moderators they do have are powerless.

One moderator spoke of watching animal cruelty to a lizard, deciding it went against community standards, but being over-ruled by superiors who thought "leaving the video up would lead to crimial punishment." As days went on, more people shared the same video and more people kept reporting it. This one moderator wound up seeing the same video come across his screen many multiple times. It happened for days until enough people reported it and the post was removed.

The people currently doing this work aren't really valued. That's why they're contractors. They are simply fodder teaching a machine how to do this insanely damaging job for the future. That's why Facebook doesn't employ them. They're going to be damaged and replaced by technology soon. That's the roadmap. Nobody wants to pay for their rehab, or their counseling, or even their wages.

In 10 years it might be more reliable, but then we'll be complaining that the human element has been completely removed.