3. T he Moderator’s Experience
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‘We still have enforcement problems. You’re going to hear that across the industry.’ — Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for global policy management
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Mark Zuckerberg once said that “in a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”17 If Facebook is like a government, then Zuckerberg heads the executive branch, or perhaps rules as monarch. The legislature takes the form of a policy team of more than 100 people working under a company vice president named Monika Bickert. A former federal prosecutor, Bickert leads a rolling process of supplementing and amending Facebook’s public Community Standards, as well as its internal guidelines interpreting the standards. Content moderators, in this scheme, are the police officers who enforce the standards. To do so, the cops on the beat rely on leads from two types of informants: human users and, increasingly, inanimate AI flagging systems. The moderators don’t work for the Facebook government, however. They are renta-cops, employed by third-party vendors. By all accounts, Bickert’s policy group works with great earnestness to craft highly granular rules that she says are intended to remove as much discretion as possible from moderators. Specificity “makes it possible for us to apply policies at this unprecedented scale of billions of posts every day,” she adds. But asked about Zuckerberg’s estimate of a 10% error rate, she bluntly acknowledges: “We still have enforcement problems. You’re going to hear that across the industry.”
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WHO MODERATES THE SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS? A CALL TO END OUTSOURCING
To round out Zuckerberg’s government metaphor, Facebook has launched the equivalent of a judicial branch. A nascent semi-autonomous Oversight Board— informally referred to as the Supreme Court of Facebook—will be populated by 40 outsiders. Facebook named the first 20 in May 2020, and the list included an impressive, diverse array of legal scholars, human rights experts, and former public officials. Working in panels of five, board members will review selected user appeals from moderators’ decisions. Apart from specific cases, the board will respond to requests for policy guidance from Facebook. These activities are designed to resolve particular disputes and establish principles that will guide the company and moderators in future cases. In a sense, the Oversight Board represents another twist on the outsourcing theme, as Facebook seeks to shift responsibility for certain moderation decisions to an independent body, albeit one that it has created and financed.
From Porn to Violence Outsourced Facebook moderation takes place at more than 20 sites worldwide, although the company won’t confirm how many countries host these sites. Thirdparty vendors—companies such as Accenture, Competence Call Center, CPL Resources, Genpact, and Majorel—
