Facebook struggled to remove sensitive content under Covid lockdown
Facebook has admitted it struggled to remove content that promoted suicide or exploited children after global lockdowns forced it to rely more heavily on automatic moderation.
Facebook sent many of its content reviewers home in March and began focusing on AI-driven moderation. In its first quarterly report on its moderation practices since the coronavirus crisis took hold, the company set out some of the successes and failures of that approach.
“We rely heavily on people to review suicide and self-injury and child exploitative content, and help improve the technology that proactively finds and removes identical or near-identical content that violates these policies,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity.
“With fewer content reviewers, we took action on fewer pieces of content on both Facebook and Instagram for suicide and self-injury, and child nudity and sexual exploitation on Instagram.”
According to the report, Facebook removed 479,400 pieces of content from Instagram for violating rules on child exploitation and nudity between April and June, down from 1 million in the previous three months.
Content that broke rules about suicide and self-harm was removed from Instagram 275,000 times over the same period, down from 1.3m the quarter before.
Not every moderation goal was similarly affected, though. Adult nudity, which is increasingly easy for companies such as Facebook to automatically flag and remove using machine vision tools, was removed from Facebook 37.5m times, down slightly from 39.5m in the first quarter of the year.
Hate speech removals, by contrast, were hugely up. In the first three months of 2020, Facebook acted on 9.6m pieces of content over hate speech violations, and in the second quarter that more than doubled, to 22.5m posts, videos and photos.
Rosen said that increase came about because the company automated the process of finding and removing hate speech in three new languages – Spanish, Arabic and Indonesian – and improved technology for finding hate speech in English and Burmese. He said these improvements meant the company now removed 95% of the hate speech it takes down proactively, without requiring a user to flag it as problematic.
As well as the standard challenges of working from home, Facebook had to deal with other problems as it gradually built up its moderators’ capacity for remote working. Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company faced data protection issues, which meant it could not allow some contractors to work on their own devices.
Mental health concerns also limited the company’s ability to fully shift work remotely, Zuckerberg said. Some of the most distressing work would only be done by full-time staff who were still able to enter the office, since the infrastructure required to provide mental health support to contractors working remotely was not in place. That constraint appears to have been what limited the company’s ability to respond to suicidal content and child exploitation material during the pandemic.
In the long term, Facebook has committed to embracing remote working even after the pandemic cools. In May, Zuckerberg said he expected that about half the company’s workforce would be remote by 2030.
“We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way,” he said. “But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years – maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range – I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”
turned 24.
But he hasn’t won anything since. Not one single tournament. Last week, Spieth was asked how he’d have felt in 2017 if someone had told him he wouldn’t win anything for the next three years. “Yeah, I mean, I probably – if you told me that, I’d probably say that guy is kind of a jerk and I’d walk the other way. But here we are.” Maybe his early form meant we all expected too much of him, or maybe it’s just that the game is pitilessly tough, that every year along come another clutch of young contenders to beat.
Right now Spieth is 60th in the world rankings. Which is some drop. He’s had his moments, finished tied third at the US PGA just last year, and third at the Masters the year before that. But still, two of the top four questions people also ask about him on Google are: “Is Jordan Spieth ill?”, and “Has Jordan Spieth retired?” No. He’s still out there, grinding away, trying to figure out how to get it back, telling himself that if he just keeps at it, it will all come together again. And maybe it will. Despite a third-round 76 at TPC Harding Park to go with that opening 73, he also shot a 67 and a 68.
In the meantime, the more he struggles, the more relatable he is. On Saturday he tugged his approach on the 14th to the far wide left of the green. “Aw God!” he said, as he stood there staring at the ground, one hand in his pocket, other propped on his club, utterly perplexed, just like any of the everyday rest of us. Spieth doesn’t really seem to have a clue what’s wrong with his game, whether it’s mental or technical. He’s just out there muttering to his ball, wrestling with the mysteries of it all.
The more complicated the mechanism, the harder it is to fix. Spieth says his problem is that he’s overthinking it. He’s not short of advice, there’s more of it out there than might be good for him. It is to his credit that he has stuck with his caddie and coach, when plenty of other players might have fired one or the other, or both. You just hope that between them they can figure it out. And fast. Lee Trevino said that the reason he took so little time over his putts was because if he was going to miss, he wanted it over quick. Spieth’s had three years of this.
season will only attenuate the rare spirit of collective action that has formed.
Counterintuitive as it feels, then, it is now more than ever that CAU, #WeAreUnited, and the nascent movement of players across the US need to double down on organizing, deepening the ties that will bind them for the next confrontation. Like Kain Colter before them, the current generation of leaders like Jevon Holland, Andrew Cooper, Treyjohn Butler, Hunter Reynolds, Benjamin
St-Juste, Jake Curhan and countless others need to focus on building the solidarity required to challenge their union-busting employers.
Now is also the time for the rest of us to have their backs. They’re going to need help, and they deserve it.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva, and Johanna Mellis are co-hosts of The End of Sportpodcast