There are mere days left in 2018, but Facebook’s eternal year of reckoning continues.
There are mere days left in 2018, but Facebook’s eternal year of reckoning continues.
A new report from the New York Times has pulled back the curtain on part of Facebook’s internal struggle to get its hands around the complex problems housed on its platform, not the least of which include disinformation and hate. The report comes as part of a monthslong investigation by Times’ Max Fisher, who obtained a massive stock of documents intended to guide thousands of moderators on the platform whose job it is to manage potentially problematic content. According to the times, Facebook’s so-described rulebooks, which the Times says contain “numerous gaps, biases and outright errors.”
The Times was reportedly provided the documents—which were confirmed as legitimate to the paper by the company—by “an employee who said he feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes.” The report paints a portrait of haphazardly assembled rulebooks comprising loose spreadsheets and PowerPoints of rules and stipulations by which moderators are tasked with policing content.
