Recently the has been a horrible outbreak called the coronavirus, causing a pandemic around the world. This is also affecting social media. Recently on due to the pandemic FaceBook has taken down and restricted the ability to share links. According to the article “Legitimate new outlet and website, including The Atlantic, USA Today, the Times of Israel, and BuzzFeed, among many other, were being taken down en masse for reportedly violating FaceBook’s spam rule. The problem impacted People’s ability to share news articles and information about the developing coronavirus pandemic.” said the staff writer. People are angered by this and find it unreasonable for FaceBook to be able to do this. Due to the pandemic most people are self quarantining themselves in their house hold which leads them to Turing to social media as one of the primary ways to stay updated on the pandemic and stay in contact with friends and family. With majority of schools being sent home to prevent spread of the virus many companies and jobs have been sending their workers home too. This includes FaceBook having to send their workers home. According to the article it states “Facebook and other tech companies have also sent home their content moderators, who serve as their first line of defense against the horrors of the internet. Their works often difficult, if not impossible to do from home. Without their labor, the internet might become a less free and more frightening place.” Therefore this causes Facebook to try its best with other methods like the automated spam filter. Even though the content moderators are sent home and probably can not continue to do their work Facebook will continue to pay their workers. These problems will are also likely to happen to Youtube and Twitter because they announced tp seed their workers home and switch to automated tools.
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-social-media-automated-content-moderation/
While this may be a serious situation, people need to realize the using social media as a form of factual information needs to come with some salt, moderated or not. AI content moderation has a lot of limitations. It’s a blunt instrument solving a problem that has endless permutations, and it can produce both false negatives and false positives. A computer can know a lot about a video or post showing how many people have seen it, which IP addresses are sharing it, what it’s been tagged as, how many times it’s been reported, whether it matches with already known illegal content. What it’s not doing is looking, and itself making a decision, All of the benefits of having the human moderation team, their cognitive ability, their sense-making ability, their ability to deal with a whole host of types of content, not just the ones for which they were expressly designed, gets lost. People need to make smart decisions and deduce the right from the wrong. Use an additional source to back up the claim and make sure to use good sources when believing articles. This should’ve already been the case but the idea should be practiced now when Facebook is ripe for false media targeting