Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is trying to tackle the rabid spread of sensational content on its site by taking “more drastic measures.” In a conference call with the media last week, Zuckerberg stated, “People naturally engage with more sensational content. What we see is that as content gets closer to the line of what is prohibited by our community standards, people seem to engage with it more.” By tweaking their news feed algorithm, Zuckerberg hopes to reduce distribution for that “borderline” content on the social network.
In an effort to further moderate the inciting content, Facebook is also making a handful of other major changes. To be more transparent to its users, the company will start to share its meeting minutes on content policy with the public, and to keep things fair and impartial, decisions on content can be appealed to an independent body, taking the final verdict out of Facebook’s hands.
In a recent Facebook post, Zuckerberg stated that the company’s proactive employment of artificial intelligence (AI) methods can report potentially problematic content. “This approach helps us identify and remove a much larger percent of the harmful content — and we can often remove it faster, before anyone even sees it rather than waiting until it has been reported,” he wrote. The social media giant will also release quarterly reports on how well its artificial intelligence works to identify content that needs to be taken down.
Zuckerberg concluded, “Moving from reactive to proactive handling of content at scale has only started to become possible recently because of advances in artificial intelligence — and because of the multi-billion dollar annual investments we can now fund. To be clear, the state of the art in AI is still not sufficient to handle these challenges on its own. So we use computers for what they’re good at — making basic judgements on large amounts of content quickly — and we rely on people for making more complex and nuanced judgements that require deeper expertise.”
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