3 ms·
The question is whether Facebook is a communications company or a media company. Are they like GMail, where they aren't responsible for everything that goes thr
by notriddle 8y ago
The question is whether Facebook is a communications company or a media company. Are they like GMail, where they aren't responsible for everything that goes through their pipes, or are they like Vice, where they clearly are?
Facebook obviously wants the publicity of a media company and the legal protections of a communications company. Which is obviously stupid, but that's the weird situation we're in.
- WorldMaker 8y agoFacebook also obviously thinks of themselves as a tech company first and foremost, so the question of moderating and scaling moderating is considered almost solely from the standpoint of it being a technical problem. The problem is a social and human one. Newspapers have traditionally handled it with editors and people and human policies. Facebook isn't inclined to explore editors and people and human policies, not because they don't scale or we don't know how to scale them (Wikipedia has scaled relatively okay, for what that is worth as an example; Newspapers have used editors and researchers for a long time), but that it's not an interesting technical problem to scale people. Facebook even had people hired in some of these moderation roles for a while, but it was sexier for them to use essentially blackbox algorithms that turned out were easy to game by malevolent entities. Now they only seem to question "fixing" the blackboxes rather than finding solutions that use smart or trained people.