Facebook defends its moderation policies, again
It pointed out where policies and notes on meetings are publicly available.
Now that the latest New York Times article about Facebook has hit -- following earlier stories on its moderation missteps from Motherboard and ProPublica -- the social network is once again defending itself. In a blog post it denied charges that moderators operate under "quotas," saying that "Reviewers' compensation is not based on the amount of content they review, and our reviewers aren't expected to rely on Google Translate as they are supplied with training and supporting resources."
It also pointed to posts it's made exposing its internal guidelines and the minutes from meetings where policy changes are discussed. If you'd like to read through those those, the latest ones are right here (PDF). According to the uncredited post, "We've been accused of being "ad hoc," "disorganized," "secretive," and doing things "on the cheap." This couldn't be further from the truth....Throughout 2018, we've introduced more transparency into our policies and provided data on how we enforce them. We've got more in store in 2019, and we look forward to people's feedback."
Separately, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tossed in his own reflections on 2018, and said "We're a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We've fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we've systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm." Are any of those changes enough to turn the narrative around next year? We'll find out soon enough.
