[sciguy77]

I saw a heartbreaking YouTube mini-documentary on Facebook moderators.[1] The American workers seem to get the "lighter" flags like animal abuse, which is more than enough to cause trauma with daily exposure. I shudder to think what the offshore moderators go through when dealing with human/child abuse flags.

In my view, Facebook clearly wants this to be a temporary evil, so they can use the data from human moderators as a training set for automated ML-based moderation. But I wonder how long people will have to endure this for those models to reach an acceptable efficacy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDnjiNCtFk4

[munk-a]

> In my view, Facebook clearly wants this to be a temporary evil, so they can use the data from human moderators as a training set for automated ML-based moderation. But I wonder how long people will have to endure this for those models to reach an acceptable efficacy.

Alternatively I wonder if it's worth it to put any number of human beings through this kind of suffering for something as worthless as social networking.

[jessaustin]

You, too, can walk away from Omelas.

[michaelmrose]

It's a beautiful story.

https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas By Ursula LeGuin

[malandrew]

Let's assume social networking is worthless per your judgment: Do you honestly think this problem will go away if centralized social networks go away?

[munk-a]

Yes, this is a new thing AFAICT. Magazines that frequently published reader content didn't have to sift through quite as vile content when going through letters - death threats and the like have always been a thing but somehow we've lost the cost of creating vile content in this modern era. I've never heard of anyone getting a visit from the FBI over vague death threats on facebook.

[celtain]

This kind of content came with the internet, not social networks. Traditional forum moderators have had to deal with really vile content for a long time now, along with the operators of almost any other media sharing website.

Unless you want to make it illegal for individuals to widely share content without going through an editor, this kind of problem isn't going away any time soon.

[jessaustin]

It really depends on how any particular site functions. Some sites function better than others. For example, "this kind of problem" doesn't seem to plague us here on HN.

[Retric]

You might find this interesting as it relates to a 44-month imprisonment and Facebook.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/16/supreme-...

On June 1, 2015, the Supreme Court reversed Elonis's conviction in an 8-1 decision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonis_v._United_States#Deci...

[tjpnz]

I'm guessing that most of the stuff heard about Facebook and ML is basically hype. Even after Christchurch the best they could do to counteract the spread was content fingerprinting. Human moderators are likely their longterm solution.