2018 hasn’t been an relaxed year for Facebook, but its one-size-fits-all method to content limitation and its denial to make deep changes are landing the Social Network in trouble.
Facebook has been in the news this year for all the wrong reasons. And as if privacy scandals, investigations, and allegations weren’t enough, a recent New York Times article comes to cap it all off like a cherry on top. The article concentrations on leaked internal papers that show how Facebook tries to regulate content on its platform and the irregularities that characterize this attempt. Yes, it’s fast becoming the villainous tech giant that everyone loves to hate, but the company – or rather its top executives – aren’t exactly making the right moves either.
From the documents, it’s become clear that Facebook’s moderators – those accountable for flagging and policing content – are extremely overworked and to make things not as good as they depend on on information that is both outdated and, in many cases, incorrect. I would agree that intensive care content produced by over 2.5 billion users is challenging (especially if many of them are up to no good in the first place), but Facebook is doing it in the mistaken way.
On one hand, it doesn’t pay enough local moderators with broad local information on significant issues and their impact.
In many cases, moderators (mostly English-speakers depend on Google Translate to figure out the content of posts and comments) only have seconds in which to determine whether to flag something or not. On the other, Facebook foundations its moderators from external contractors, and one can only wonder whether they ever receive the right drill. And even if they did take the right drill, how many of them are really desired to be able to regulate the sheer volume of content effectually?
From the way Facebook is managing this, it has become clear that it is counting on on momentary fixes for a problem that is fast getting out of hand. As a substitute of depending on on local experts, and strong local teams that are well-informed and well-trained, its top administrators are pumping out policy from an ivory tower, without really thoughtful what’s happening on the ground. This has already led to circumstances that have moved beyond its control.
For these inadequacies (and a few others), Facebook is now being targeted by numerous supervisory bodies and governments across the globe. Whether it’s the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) investigating the company for violating GDPR across Europe, of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) looking into previous and recent data breaches, or managers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore, France, Belgium other countries sounding the cautioning bells, there is anxiety on the horizon.
Mark Zuckerberg newly alleged that “He’s proud of the progress we’ve made,” as he defended his company’s handling of the crises, but I feel the world has a changed view. Facebook needs to do something extreme soon enough.
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