Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

But that's not the sort of content classification you mean, is it.

So the problem isn't technical. Rather it's an entirely self inflicted problem by Facebook. The cause is an attempt to broker a compromise between the original spirit of the site and internal activists who are bent on controlling information and manipulating opinion. The reason they make so many bad judgement calls is because they're not trying to impose clearly defined rules, but rather, ever shifting and deliberately ill-posed left wing standards like "misinformation" or "hate speech". Because these terms are defined and redefined on a near daily basis by ideological warriors and not some kind of universal social consensus, it is absolutely inevitable that the site ends up like this. A death spiral in which no amount of moderation can ever be sufficient for some of their loudest employees simply cannot be avoided once you cross the Rubicon of arbitrary vague censorship rules.

If Facebook want to reduce the number of embarrassing incidents, they can do it tomorrow. All they have to do is stop trying to label misinformation or auto-classify posts as racist/terrorism-supporting/etc. Stand up and loudly defend the morality of freedom of speech. Refocus their abuse teams on auto-generated commercial spam, like webmail companies do, and leave the rest alone. This isn't hard, they did it in the early days of the site. It may mean firing employees who don't agree, but those employees would never get tired of waging war against opinions they don't like no matter how much was spent on moderation, so it's ultimately futile trying to please them.

At the very least, you could be transparent about what the algorithm actually is, or even gasp give the user control over it.

You ask - isn't moderation the problem they're trying to solve. This gets to the heart of the matter. What is the actual problem Facebook are facing here?

I read the WSJ article and the quotes from the internal documents. To me the articles and documents are discussing this problem: their content moderation is very unreliable (10% error rate according to Zuck) therefore they have created a massive whitelist of famous people who would otherwise get random takedowns which would expose the arbitrary and flaky nature of the system. By their own telling this is unfair, unequal, runs counter to the site's founding principles and has led to bad things like lying to their own oversight board.

It's clear from this thread that some HN posters are reading it and seeing a different problem: content moderation isn't aggressive enough and stupid decisions, like labelling a discussion of paint as racist, should just apply to everyone without exception.

I think the actual problem is better interpreted the first way. Facebook created XCheck because their content moderation is horrifically unreliable. This is not inherent to the nature of automated decision making, as Gmail spam filtering shows - it works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics. Rather, it's inherent to the extremely vague "rules" they're trying to enforce, which aren't really rules at all but rather an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left. But most people aren't activists. If they just rolled back their content policies to what they were seven or eight years ago, the NYT set would go berserk, but most other people wouldn't care much or would actively approve. After all, they didn't care before and Facebook's own documents show that their own userbase is making a sport out of mocking their terrible moderation.

Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments". There could be nothing more on-topic, as you must know from reading the article. The XCheck system exists to stop celebrities and politicians from being randomly whacked by an out of control auto-moderator system. A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents. You can read the article for free if you sign in - that's how I did it.

> The problem you cite could be addressed in many ways.

Can you suggest some?

Remember back in the day when a friend got a new game console and invited you over to check it out with the ideal that you'd get to try it but they only had one controller? Really all they wanted to do was have you come and watch them play, and you sat there until you got bored of never having a chance to engage with it? That is the modern social media experience.

They play with your ability to be visible even to people that follow you for updates on your posts. The only way for non-elites (people deemed worthy of ranking) is to pay for ads, which appear as lower quality "promoted" content.

The model of social media started with everyone on the same playing field, but there are so many dimensions that can be manipulated to keep users thinking that it is functional while these sites change to serving the purpose of generating revenue for partners and paying interests underneath a façade of being fair communities. If you speak out against them, they censor you as well, all behind the scenes.

It's simply better to go back to creating independent sites, and then to hope you get ranked fairly on Google, and that people bookmark you... We become powerless when we allow corporate control of our communication, because governments are not aware nor vigilant of/to the impacts to regulate social sites until it's far too late, and because profit is king in that world over simply doing what is fair and positive. The business model feeds misinformation, chaos, disharmony, and conflict, just like reality TV does now, Why? Because it keeps people glued to their screens.

Even these platforms are terrified of instituting positive changes out of fear of losing their market share and user base... Overnight Twitter, FaceBook, IG, or any of these sites can lose their user base and reach just like Club House and Vine... That has to be said as well.

A big problem is that many accounts that post sensationalized (violent, graphic, sexual) content are really run by people that are building follower accounts to sell later on, as a symptom of heavily limited organic account growth (the ability to get followers) on these platforms... People build accounts by posting wild content and then sell them on the black market to others who start out looking like popular individuals because the accounts come with followers already included. Being successful on social media is no longer about having quality content, it's about how much you pay and how professional your image is... No wonder why class-ism has taken hold on it all.

There are still plenty of ways of maintaining fairness on any of these communities/platforms, and company leadership needs to go back and review the original promises they made to everyone in order to build their current user base (promises that they've all now totally broken) and fix those issues as the primary basis for resetting their flaws and oversight.