Nick Clegg: Nigeria is Epicenter for Tech Dynamism in Africa
But with some other platforms one can easily calculate it, just like what creators make from streaming and others?
Since we are launching in June, the specifics would be defined. We cannot calculate how much money you make because it depends on the audience and how good you are with it. Absolutely, by time we get to June and when it becomes available they would know. We would obviously work with the creators on all that. They’re super smart as I’ve just discovered, but we will explain to them how the tools work. They can see how other creators deploy them to good effects around the world. Clearly the advertisements and the reels’ adverts are the most powerful monetisation models. But it’s up to the creators to decide how to make best use of those tools. It’s probably best syncs with us and with them. Once again, I say June is the latest time, but I am pushing the team to try and get these available as quickly as possible. Who knows, it might be earlier than June, but certainly by June at the latest you will have it.
Let’s talk about Llama and Open Source and are you engaging communities in Nigeria as well on these tools?
Absolutely. I was just talking to some team here who’ve already used llama, incredibly, cleverly to start recording and developing and running training databases of oral languages which are formally written down to develop the capacity to run them using our AI tools. There was a lady there who’s using some of our AI-related databases to predict where health demand is going to spike and some of those tools also used to plan energy demand because we can we can provide databases on where people are clustered. I think Llama has been downloaded 30 million times so far around the world. It’s an incredibly versatile tool. As you know, it comes in two forms in pre-trained form and a fine-tuned form. We’re working on the next generation llama three which will be much more powerful, much more versatile and I hope will provide many more use cases for educators, researchers and developers.
What are you doing about content moderation in Africa?
Even if we quintuple the number of content moderators, you can’t only use human content moderators. We also rely heavily on automated systems because that is the nature of AI. It just gets better and better. If you look the global prevalence of hate speech on Facebook, it has declined hugely over the last two or three years by 50 to 60 per cent. Now, the prevalence of hate speech is about 0.01 per cent of total Facebook content and that’s principally because of advances in AI. But to your point, of course, we also need content moderators to deal with edge cases, to make adjudications on new escalations and so on and we believe that we meet the very highest standards across the industry of care and support for our content moderators. There is a legal process going on in Kenya, which of course I shouldn’t comment on because it’s subjudice. But I am optimistic and I very much hope that we will be able to continue to work effectively with the highly qualified content moderators in Africa and indeed elsewhere. Actually, generative AI will become an ever more effective tool in triaging content; so that the content that human content moderators see, is the is really the sub-category of a subcategory of content that really needs human adjudication and I’m optimistic that we are making real improvements.
Beyond content moderation and hate speech, how are you dealing with misinformation?
We employ the world’s largest network of independentfactcheckers.There’snoothercompany on the planet that uses as many fact checkers as we do. All our fact checkers are independently verified by the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). They vet whether a fact checker has the necessary independence and objectivity to be able to carry out the task. Fact checkers as you know are able to look at any content to decide for themselves what they think is a form of misinformation. We have again, an increasingly sophisticated automated system, which NQ’s content, particularly content that we think has signs of misinformation and which our systems believe might go viral. There’s no point us asking fact checkers to look at a piece of content that only three people are going to see. So, we try and orient the channel and funnel the content our fact checkers look at that so that they look at misinformation or potential misinformation which might be seen by large numbers of people and then they are independently able to adjudicate whether it’s false, or partly false or missing context and then depending on that categorisation, we then remove it. Of course we remove contents that are threat to people or poses a threat to people’s safety, but what we do with false information, which is shown by these independent fact checkers to be false is that we demote it, so that it is much lower on your feed. You have to scroll on your feed for a long time to find it and we put a filter on it so you need to double click to see it. And we very clearly say to users that this has been shown by an independent fact checker to be of questionable accuracy or veracity. The names of the fact checkers in Nigeria are Dubawa, Africa check and AFP. These are the three fact checkers in Nigeria which obviously is appropriate for the size of the market. Do they catch every single piece of item? Probably not. But it is by far one of the most sophisticated by any global platform to try and deal with misinformation. We are the only company that has built an independent oversight board, which is independent of us. We have invested over $700 million into a separate Trust which is made up of an independent panel of scholars, juries, Nobel Prize winners, former Heads of Governments, including from Africa, and they have the independent rights to look at contents that we have moderated and they can adjudicate on issues. In addition to that, we are the only company that every 12 weeks, along with our financial results, we publish to explain not only what human beings are seeing on Facebook, but also what contents we act against, even before anyone reports it to us. That is entirely audited by Ernst & Young. With the sheer volume of contents that operates online, you are never going to catch everything just like within every society you cannot eliminate all crimes. But I do think we have made huge strides in recent years to be more transparent about how effective we are and to have great accountability and scrutiny through these independent institutions and of course the use of fact checkers.
While speaking earlier, you talked about the positive sides of the Nigerian tech ecosystem. How do you think the government can harness these talents to help support the country’s advancement?
Obviously, connectivity is a big issue. At the end of the day, each sovereign government in each country needs to decide how they are they connected. I also think getting the right regulation is pretty important. We’ve made no secret of the fact that, for instance, the regulation or legislation, which was introduced a year or two ago, by the Advertising Regulatory Council is slightly ill-fitting in an online environment because it treats online adverts a bit like they’re sort of traditional analogue billboards.
Advertisers have to basically have each ad prevetted, you have to pay a fee to an administration and administration only meets once a month. That’s simply not the way that ads work in the online world. They’re much higher speed, much lower friction, much more inexpensive, which is the whole point of online ads. We just don’t think regulation like that really serves and supports Nigeria’s small and medium sized businesses because they’re the ones who rely on our platform to reach their customers. So, if you have legislation, which is slightly from the analogue world being applied to the digital world, you get this unnecessary friction. That’s an example where I think government could maybe have a rethink about whether the regulation really makes sense and is properly supportive of Nigerian, small and medium sized businesses. So I think that’s an area where political decision makers can make a difference if they wanted to.