[wpietri]

It's honestly not clear to me that many of these companies can afford proper moderation. Twitter's revenue is about $1.20 per user per month. Facebook's is about twice that. Proper moderation is expensive, with each incident requiring significant time from one or more smart people with native fluency and cultural understanding plus deep familiarity with the platform rules and all the tricks bad actors will try to play to get moderators to do the wrong thing.

[throw10920]

These companies explicitly and intentionally cultivated profit models built around providing services for free and subsidizing them with data collection and advertising. Their low revenue-per-user is a direct result of that, and if they can't afford to provide proper moderation, that's entirely their fault, and does not absolve them of the responsibility to provide it anyway.

[hliyan]

Exactly. If your car company cannot be profitable with airbags, then you shouldn't be in the car business (to use an analogy).

[cbtacy]

This is the absolute best analogy I've ever seen for this situation. Kudos.

[wpietri]

Oh, totally agreed. But I think this is one of those things that kinda crept up on us, and so status quo bias may mean they can keep getting away with it.

As an example, look at the flu. It kills way more people than drunk driving, [1] [2], but society has been pretty casual about that. The massive covid-era drops in influenza deaths show that it was always possible to do much better; we just never cared much because we were used to it. Similarly, I think we're used to Facebook and Twitter being Facebook and Twitter, so there won't be much outcry for change unless they do something especially bad.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html#:~:text=Figu...

[2] e.g., https://www.valuepenguin.com/drunk-driving-statistics