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Meta Caught Running Ads for Child Abuse (futurism.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Facebook has the money to hire enough moderators, though. They're starting to not grow any more, but content moderation is one of the last things that should get cut instead of the first. When Yahoo started dying*, moderation was also the first thing to go.

Like a canary in a coal mine.

* it's technically not dead, but it's basically dead. People keep telling me Yahoo is inevitable, and its continued existence is evidence of this. /s

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (2 children)

    I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.

    Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?

    Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).

    If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.

    Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.

    But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Zuck is one of the richest people on the planet. He has the kind of money that could track the original source of the advert and pay to have them publically executed, then pay the fines and court fees to publically show why it was justifiable.

    They don't moderate these things because they have been facilitating it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yeah there's a huge difference between "they can't afford a proportionate number of moderators" and "firing the existing moderators is acceptable because they can't afford the appropriate number". Because at least the latter was a little water on the dumpster fire.

    It does go to show that AI will performatively replace actual talent, though. The "it'll augment their effectiveness" people were wrong in the one case where you'd figure it would be a layup for increasing moderation quality and turnaround (and maybe even protecting the existing moderators from the mental harm that we all know Facebook is offloading onto public services and taxpayers, at best).

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