Facebook staff baffled by rulebook United States
Facebook’s content moderators are overstretched and must make sense of more than 1400 pages of ‘‘Byzantine’’ guidelines to make their decisions, an investigation has found.
The 7500-plus staff and contractors who police billions of posts a day have to make decisions within seconds, and often rely on Google Translate to read foreign languages, company insiders say – and inconsistent rules mean they have censored mainstream speech in some countries while leaving extremist speech uncensored in others.
One employee said he feared that the social media and publishing company, which has more than two billion users, was exercising too much power with too little oversight and making too many mistakes. He showed the New York Times moderator guidelines arranged in ‘‘dozens of unorganised PowerPoint presentations’’.
Issues identified by the newspaper included a failure to ban Ma Ba Tha, an extremist group in Myanmar that has been accused of fomenting genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority. Facebook said this was an error it had corrected.
The slides indicate that Facebook has failed to crack down on far-right groups in Russia and Ukraine to the same extent as in the United States and Britain, although there is a higher incidence of neo-Nazi violence in those countries.
Far-right groups banned elsewhere include Golden Dawn, the Greek political party.
Experts said the censorship of such organisations that were legal in their home countries was ‘‘problematic’’, with Facebook taking on the role of judge.
Based on an apparent misunderstanding of India’s blasphemy laws, Facebook also told moderators to take down posts in that country which were critical of a religion.
In addition
‘‘We have billions of posts every day. We’re identifying more and more potential violations.’’ Monika Bickert, Facebook head of global policy management
to containing errors, some guidelines on sensitive topics are out of date. For example, Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic is referred to as a ‘‘fugitive’’, although he was arrested eight years ago and is in prison.
Previous leaked guidelines for Facebook’s moderators said comments about snapping the necks of ‘‘bitches’’ should be allowed, as they did not pose a credible threat.
Commenting on the latest findings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, said the company had been largely successful in preventing harm, but could not achieve perfection.
‘‘We have billions of posts every day. We’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems. At that scale, even if you’re 99 per cent accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.’’
The leak comes after claims that moderators are underresourced and have been hired as a PR stunt to protect the company’s image.
Facebook moderators are ‘‘bombarded’’ with ‘‘thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder’’, according to a US lawsuit the company is contesting. Selena Scola, the complainant, said she developed post-traumatic stress disorder after she was required to watch thousands of hours of such footage, with few safeguards.