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I'm not sure how hard FB actually tries to moderate extremist political content. They're pretty damn good at quickly taking down child porn and copyrighted mov

I'm not sure how hard FB actually tries to moderate extremist political content. They're pretty damn good at quickly taking down child porn and copyrighted movies/music, because those are areas where big money & potential criminal liability are on the line. In contrast, nobody's forcing them to censor political extremism, and the usual "engagement" metrics that they and their advertisers track would likely reward that content. In the last few days, they've shut down thousands of groups and hundreds of thousands of accounts for sharing QAnon conspiracies, which strongly suggests to me that they've had the technical ability to do that for quite a while. They're not "bad at" moderation, they just choose to moderate certain things and not others.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Most people here could hack together some basic keyword searches for questionable content in a day at the outside. I think we can assume that Facebook already has the tools to run those searches at scale and act on the results. So I don't think there's any good reason to disagree with you. At best, Facebook has prioritised "engagement" - i.e. ad revenue - over unacceptable extremism. At worst Facebook is knowingly complicit in the politics and in the polarisation that is being generated. It would be impossible to know which of those is true without access to internal records. But there should at least be an investigation asking these questions. And not just of Facebook, but of all the social tech and media giants.