Content reviewers are inconsistent, agrees Facebook

Published on December 29, 2017

Facebook is among the most popular social networking platforms at the moment. For many, it may feel that this is a pure advantage that Facebook has over others. However, there are a few drawbacks to this. The company ends up being under constant scrutiny for its responsibility towards promotion of true information. In an effort to meet up with these expectations, Facebook has been implementing anti-hate speech systems to its platform. Unfortunately, no results have been gained out of them and even Facebook agrees to this.

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According to a report published by Android Headlines, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has apparently admitted that the anti-speech systems that it has implemented over the course of this year (such as content reviewers) have turned out to be inconsistent. This admission only emerged due to a crowd-sourced investigation into the manner in which Facebook deals with hate speech and fake content.

During the investigation, approximately forty-nine posts that reflected hate speech were found. The problem with this was that Facebook’s content reviewers refused to define as hateful or sexist speech after being made aware of their existence. This led to a second review, wherein Facebook said that its reviewers were wrong by not taking twenty-two out of forty-nine posts down immediately.

There were six separate cases wherein the social media platform said that the reviewers were wrong in not categorizing them as forbidden posts on the social media platform. The content clearly violated the guidelines of Facebook. However, the reviewers were unable to understand the problem with it.

Facebook’s Vice President, Justin Osofsky published a public apology for these avoidable mistakes. He further went on to reiterate that Facebook’s previously announced plans to double its online security team to 20,000 employees by the end of 2018 were very well under-way. “66,000 posts labeled as hate speech are removed by Facebook on a yearly basis but the company is trying to tread a line between content that’s clearly illegally hateful and pure censorship,” the report by Android Headlines quoted Osofsky as saying.

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