Facebook has come under withering criticism this past year from folks who say the company is not doing enough to stem hate speech, online harassment and the spread of false news stories.
November 14,2020 report Facebook has come under withering criticism this past year from folks who say the company is not doing enough to stem hate speech, online harassment and the spread of false news stories. To be fair, the task of policing the activities of 1.62 billion daily users generating 4 petabytes of data, including 350 million photos, per day is no small task. It’s not easy being the world’s largest social platform. Still, the company has been criticized for allowing scores of hate-fueled groups to spread offensive and threatening posts and for allowing ultra-rightwing conspiracy-theory groups such as QAnon to freely spread false political allegations. Academic and governmental analyses of the 2016 presidential election uncovered evidence of massive interference by domestic and foreign actors, and it appears similar efforts were undertaken in the 2020 election as well. Facebook employs 15,000 content moderators to review reports of misbehavior ranging from political subterfuge to harassment to terroristic threats to child exploitation. They have generally tackled reports chronologically, frequently allowing more serious allegations to go unaddressed for days while lesser issues were reviewed. On Friday, Facebook announced that it will bring machine learning into he moderating process. It will utilize algorithms to detect the most severe issues and assign them to human moderators. Software moderators will continue to handle lower-level abuse such as copyright infringement and spam.
