>> Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit
You're underestimating the scale of this problem.
Facebook users create billions of new posts a day. And, tens of millions of these posts get reported for moderation per day.
"Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.
>> Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far
You must be joking. Facebook has already made massive investments into moderation. It's their top priority for 2019. In many ways, they are doing the opposite of pretending this problem doesn't exist.
>> They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist.
Nobody is arguing that FB has an inherent right to exist. The only point GP made was that (as made evident by your comment) many people are underestimating the associated costs with manual moderation of content.
> "Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.
Should all online platforms be required to do that? I can post here on HN right now and no moderator is pre-approving my content.
I could go find the shooter’s illegal manifesto and post it here, I might be banned after some period of time but just like on Facebook it would have had time for other people to see it.
Applied consistently this standard would kill most online forums and that type of thing.
It’s a matter of scale. Even before they became larger than the largest single nation on Earth, Facebook used to get in the news for stories like “1000 people show up to birthday party after teen accidentally forgets privacy settings”. Hacker News can #ahem# slashdot servers it links to, so it’s not exactly small, but it’s still peanuts compared to Facebook.
Just as software engineering practices need to change for the big names compared to everyone else, so do social practices.
You're underestimating the scale of this problem.
Facebook users create billions of new posts a day. And, tens of millions of these posts get reported for moderation per day.
"Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.
>> Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far
You must be joking. Facebook has already made massive investments into moderation. It's their top priority for 2019. In many ways, they are doing the opposite of pretending this problem doesn't exist.
>> They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist.
Nobody is arguing that FB has an inherent right to exist. The only point GP made was that (as made evident by your comment) many people are underestimating the associated costs with manual moderation of content.