Facebook is attempting to tackle misinformation and hate that its platform has enabled with a massive, byzantine and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides that gets updated regularly for its global content moderators.
According to the blockbuster New York Times report, the rules show the social network to be “a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself.” The Times discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors — including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.
The rulebook’s details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he “feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company is trying to monitor billions of posts per day in over 100 languages while parsing out the subtle nuances and complicated context of language, images and even emojis. The group of Facebook employees who meet every other Tuesday to update the rules, according to the Times, are trying to boil down highly complex issues into strict yes-or-no rules.
The Menlo Park, Calif. company then outsources the content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers, according to the newspaper’s report. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to “jihad,” for example, forbidden? When is a “crying laughter” emoji a warning sign?”
Some moderators vented their frustration to the Times, lamenting that posts left up could lead to violence. “You feel like you killed someone by not acting,” one said, speaking anonymously because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement. Moderators also revealed that they face pressure to review a thousand pieces of content per day, with only eight to 10 seconds to judge each post.
The Times probe published a wide range of slides from the rulebook, ranging from easily understood to somewhat head-scratching, and detailed numerous instances where Facebook’s speech rules simply failed. Its guidelines for the Balkans appear “dangerously out of date,” an expert on that region told the paper. A legal scholar in India found “troubling mistakes” in Facebook’s guidelines that pertain to his country. – READ MORE