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Risky content is site’s ‘crack cocaine’ Blunt: take down fake profiles
FACEBOOK is failing to tackle extreme material on the platform – with one violent video staying online for six years, a probe found.
The social network thrives on such controversial content, its moderators told undercover reporters.
And an early investor said keep users hooked on the site.
Venture capitalist Roger Mcnamee, one of Facebook’s first backers and an ex-mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said: “It’s essentially the crack cocaine of their product. It’s the really extreme, dangerous content that attracts the most highly engaged people.”
Channel 4’s Dispatches infiltrated a Facebook content moderation centre in Dublin. It claimed up to 7,000 posts flagged daily as inappropriate were not assessed within the company’s 24-hour target.
Some were left for five days or more, with a video of a man Star James it helps attacking a toddler left for six years as it did not have a “celebratory” caption. In training, moderators were told a cartoon suggesting that drowning a girl if her first boyfriend is black was permitted because it did not abuse a protected ethnic or religious group. One moderator told an undercover reporter: “If you start censoring too much, people lose interest in the platform. It’s all about making money.” Facebook later said both posts violate standards. It also said a backlog of unmoderated material was cleared. Mr Mcnamee said the advertisingfunded firm needed people to spend more time on the site. He adds on tonight’s Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network: “The people on the extremes are the really valuable ones. One person can often provoke 50 or 100 others.” Facebook insisted: “Shocking content doesn’t make us more money. People come to Facebook for a safe experience. There is a minority prepared to abuse our systems and others.” JAMES Blunt has blasted Facebook for not removing fake profiles that pretend to be him and try to scam his fans.
The singer, 44, told his 5.8 million followers that the social media site was not doing enough to “protect people”.
Addressing Facebook, he said: “I’ve written to you to report more than 40 fake profiles pretending to be me... some offering fake ‘cheap tickets’ to my concerts. But you refuse to take them down.”
Facebook last year admitted there were up to 270 million fake accounts on the website.