Programmatic Advertising. Basically a automated auction for advertising spaces – the more visitors, the more expensive the place — with practically no oversight (mostly through Google and Meta) of who takes part. Which is also a reason, why this practice has a problem with malware (malvertising) and fake news and why it should be illegal, but you know how it is over there.
I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.
There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.
I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.
Facebook has the money to hire enough moderators, though. They’re starting to not grow any more, but content moderation is one of the last things that should get cut instead of the first. When Yahoo started dying*, moderation was also the first thing to go.
Like a canary in a coal mine.
* it’s technically not dead, but it’s basically dead. People keep telling me Yahoo is inevitable, and its continued existence is evidence of this. /s
I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.
Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?
Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).
If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.
Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.
But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.
It’s absolutely possible to moderate. But doing so would require more payroll than the tech companies are willing to spend. So instead, they simply let CSAM ads run rampant.
Hpw do you run ads for child abuse?
OK…
How did we get here?
That’s what they said would happen…
How bad is it?
The videos promote child abuse and invite you to join a Telegram group to have access to it. So, that’s bad, and also sounds like a honeypot.
Programmatic Advertising. Basically a automated auction for advertising spaces – the more visitors, the more expensive the place — with practically no oversight (mostly through Google and Meta) of who takes part. Which is also a reason, why this practice has a problem with malware (malvertising) and fake news and why it should be illegal, but you know how it is over there.
I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.
There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.
I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.
I’m sure it’s still possible for humans to moderate paid adds content, its a small part of the overall traffic volume.
Fair enough. But I think we’d be just as upset to see pedos organizing in unpaid content.
Facebook has the money to hire enough moderators, though. They’re starting to not grow any more, but content moderation is one of the last things that should get cut instead of the first. When Yahoo started dying*, moderation was also the first thing to go.
Like a canary in a coal mine.
* it’s technically not dead, but it’s basically dead. People keep telling me Yahoo is inevitable, and its continued existence is evidence of this. /s
I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.
Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?
Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).
If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.
Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.
But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.
It’s absolutely possible to moderate. But doing so would require more payroll than the tech companies are willing to spend. So instead, they simply let CSAM ads run rampant.
Also, exposing the moderators to extreme content like this is traumatizing.
Yes it’s a thing with more than one challenge.
What would 200 million moderators cost? At a modest salary of $50k annually it’s in the trillions. They literally couldn’t pay that.