> or pay people to moderate everything, which will kill their profit because it'd be wildly expensive This gets repeated ad nauseam whenever excessive automate

> or pay people to moderate everything, which will kill their profit because it'd be wildly expensive This gets repeated ad nauseam whenever excessive automated moderation is questioned on big platforms, but I have yet to see any actual evidence of it. I don't believe for a second that the likes of Google, Facebook, or Twitter can't afford to turn down their algorithms and significantly increase their manual moderation efforts. Platforms like Reddit and Discord get along alright with limited automated moderation combined with a federated mod structure where most community-specific moderation is handled by unpaid volunteers. Those platforms are gigantic, but they don't make the front page of HN daily for illogical, heavy-handed moderation practices. Besides, nobody expects all moderation to be 100% manual. A lot of content can be reliably identified and moderated by an automated system. Automated systems can even still help with things which they cannot be certain about. Instead of removing the content and taking punitive action against the user, an automated system can just bring the questionable content to the immediate attention of an organization of humans. Not to mention we're talking about some of the wealthiest companies in the world here. Do we have any idea how much they currently spend on manual moderation? Professional content moderation isn't exactly a highly compensated position. I suspect they could increase their moderation workforce by a couple orders of magnitude without the slightest concern about breaking the bank. The big social media platforms complain that significant manual moderation impossibly expensive, but they'll say just about anything to save a dime. That's the real reason they rely so heavily on automated systems - to save as much money as possible. As long as it doesn't cut into their revenue, they'll keep doing it. And if people buy their crap about it being impossible, that suits them just fine.