Double talk at Facebook: Pandora’s box in Mark’s dorm

Facebook’s marketing messages are slick and simple and, of course, slickly simple, with a message that’s entirely and deliberately without context and meaning. “Be Connected. Be Discovered. Be on Facebook” is one of them.

Be connected to what, precisely? Be discovered by whom, and for what purpose? But who bothers with the detail here. The core message is just be on Facebook, because almost everyone else — apart from your ageing grandparents and people who still use fountain pens — on the planet is and, anyway, what’s wrong with that comforting connection idea that the young Mark Zuckerberg hit on in his Harvard dorm room?

Last night’s Channel 4 Dispatches, featuring footage of Facebook training sessions in Dublin, revealed the underbelly of an enterprise whose senior executives tell legislators — and through them, the public — one thing about their determination to do the right thing but whose managers, running the day-to-day operation, say and do quite another.

Responding earlier this year to mounting alarm about the nature of content, typically videos depicting violence and material inciting race hatred, Mr Zuckerberg started a programme to hire 3,000 content reviewers for its nice-sounding community operations team, the aim being, he said, “to review the millions of reports we get every week and improve the process for doing it quickly … If we’re going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly.”

We’ll put aside for now the question of whether an extra 3,000 post-publication censors is sufficient to police a platform that has 1.45bn daily users, and also the no small matter of whether Facebook — along with other anti-social media platforms — should be required to check uploaded material before it is published instead of waiting for complaints before it thinks about binning dangerous postings. Channel 4’s investigation demonstrated the extent to which the company’s moderators play fast and loose with yardsticks for what’s acceptable in Mark Zuckerberg’s “safe community”.

Its film showed moderators being instructed not to take down extreme, abusive or graphic content even when it breached the company’s guidelines. Nudity is almost always removed quickly — well, that’s always easy to spot quickly — yet violent videos depicting assaults on children, hate speech and pictures of young people self-harming escape censorship after they’ve been reported and looked at by moderators. A video showing a man punching and stamping on a child was rated “disturbing” yet acceptable, which means it remains online with a warning symbol.

Facebook say these decisions were mistakes that did not reflect its policies or values, while an employee had an alternative view of the company’s values: “If you start censoring too much, people stop using the platform. It’s all about money at the end of the day.” The longer users stay online, the more advertisements they see. As one critic, a now disenchanted Facebook enthusiast, explains: “It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform.”

Britain’s government and others say work is being done to draft laws that establish unambiguous standards for online platforms and provides punishments for publishers when dangerous material gets through the net. They cannot get that work done fast enough.