OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

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Facebook Is Too Big to Moderate

The numbers make it painfully obvious

Lance Ulanoff
OneZero
Published in
5 min readMay 11, 2021

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Photo by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash

More than a third of the global population of 7.8 billion people use Facebook. They post 350 million photos a day and no one seems to know (except Facebook) exactly how many overall posts Facebook sees per second (it has to be in the millions).

Now imagine human moderators standing before that tsunami of content, all 15,000 of them, spread across the globe, interpreting languages, nuances, cultural norms, political imperatives, and ideological nuances for content that crosses the line. It’s like a feather trying to hold back a hurricane.

I’ve known these numbers for a long time and have always understood, in the abstract, Facebook’s scale problem. However, something Gretchen Peters, the founder of CEO of the Alliance to Combat Online Crime, told The Today Show this week crystalized the scale of the problem for me in a way no one has done before.

Today correspondent Kate Snow was asking about the strategies Facebook and others already have in place for moderating content. Peters shook her…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Lance Ulanoff
Lance Ulanoff

Written by Lance Ulanoff

Tech expert, journalist, social media commentator, amateur cartoonist and robotics fan.

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