Some days ago, Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg (or, Mark Z. as we like to call him here) wrote a note on the social network preparing for elections. Now he is out with what he calls the 2nd of such notes before 2018 wraps up.This 1 deals with Content Governance & Enforcement. In this rather long note, Mark talks about the FB experience of the last 2 years. The time period, he says, has clearly shown that “without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these (social media) tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, & incite violence”. He adds that a painful lesson he learnt was that when one connects 2 billion people, “you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity.”
FB today faces an important question – how to balance the ideal of giving everyone a voice with the realities of keeping people safe & bringing people together? What should be the limits to what people can express? What Content should be distributed & what should be blocked? Who should decide these policies & make enforcement decisions? Who should hold those people accountable?
The FB chief explains that there isn’t a broad agreement on the right approach, & thoughtful people come to very different conclusions on what are acceptable tradeoffs. To make this even harder, cultural norms vary widely in different countries, & are shifting rapidly. These are the issues he has focused more on this note on Content governance & enforcement.
Mark has pointed out that over the course of FB’s 3-year roadmap through the end of 2019, it expects to have trained systems to proactively detect the vast majority of problematic Content. What’s important, this “proactive enforcement” doesn’t change any of the policies around what Content should stay up & what should come down. That is still determined by the Facebook Community Standards. Proactive enforcement, he has explained, simply helps the social network remove more harmful Content, faster. Some of the other improvements will affect which types of Content FB takes action against.
For those readers interested in reading Mark Z.’s note, click here.
