A report on content moderation by New York University recommends that content moderation, which is central to the work of all social media platforms, must no longer be outsourced but be included within the main fold of the platforms. In terms of numbers, 15,000 workers, majority of those employed by third-party vendors, moderate Facebook and Instagram; 10,000 moderators moderate YouTube and other Google products; Twitter has 1,500 moderators. As per the report, published by Professor Paul M. Barrett of NYU’s Center for Business and Human Rights, “given the daily volume of what is disseminated on these sites, they’re grossly inadequate”. The report primarily focussed on Facebook as a case study. As the COVID-19 pandemic grew, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter sent their contracted content moderators home and relied more heavily on AI-based moderation. All three companies conceded that this would lead to greater errors and lack of contextualising. In a later call with American journalists, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that some of the company’s full-time employees would review “the most sensitive types of content”. The report wants Facebook to use its response to the pandemic as a “pilot project to assess the feasibility of making all content moderators Facebook employees”. Read: Reliance on automated content takedowns needs to be reconsidered: MediaNama’s take Problems with outsourcing content moderation As content moderation has been outsourced to third-party vendors such as Cognizant, Genpact, Accenture, Majorel, Competence Call Center, etc. in the Philippines, India, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Latvia and Kenya, these content…
