Facebook wants to be liked,
but lately some thumbs down
pressuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility
and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake and I'm sorry.
The social media giant on Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California
is under pressure.
venturing inside building 10 and the inner courtyard of one of Facebook's campuses
feels like strolling down an outdoor mall.
Restaurants, bars, even a place to hang
in Hackers Square
The ideal environment to consider how best to
connect the world.
But these days Facebook needs its zen garden
As its forced to try and fix the collateral damage
from users who hijack facebook to
spread violence fake news or hate
Our hate speech policy if I think about five years ago it was a much less
nuanced policy but as we've seen the words that people use
to attack one another change we've incorporated that into our standards.
We asked Monica Bickert, Vice-President of Global Policy
to answer some complaints about content.
We make clear we don't remove something just for being upsetting or
offensive but ultimately we will only remove something if it crosses the line
into for instance hate speech or bullying or harassment.
Where we draw the line as if people start attacking other people
based on their race, their religion,
other characteristics that are sensitive or protected.
What about sex, what about being a woman?
Yes, if somebody criticizes somebody else or attacks
somebody solely on the basis of her gender we will remove that comment.
But sometimes the damage is already done.
Take Alex Minassian who drove a van down
Toronto's Yonge Street ramming into people.
The accused is alleged to have posted
a cryptic message on Facebook
minutes before he began driving the rented van
Minassian's post praised mass killer Elliot Rodger
who targeted women and killed six people in 2014.
If we find any evidence of a credible threat our terms
and the law allow us to send that directly to law enforcement
and that's what we do.
So let me understand clearly,
Elliot Rodger had already committed a crime.
Murdered six people in the United States some time ago.
So his name would have flagged anything so
Are you taking down anything that mentions Elliot Rodger?
His name wouldn't necessarily flag anything.
Reviewers know that you cannot praise or support Elliot Rodgers.
So if somebody reported content to us or
we somehow became aware of content
that was praising or supporting him we would remove it.
In this case Facebook removed Minassian's account after the rampage
identifying harmful posts or fake accounts is becoming such a challenge
the company is growing an army of content reviewers.
Now 7500 spread throughout the world.
"Every day people from all over the world
share billions of things on Facebook."
Recently, for the first time Facebook
published its standards for what is or is not acceptable content revealing how
it decides to pull content or leave it up.
"If you see something that you think
violates these standards report it by clicking the report link."
Did you do that because of pressure?
Because of people unhappy with
what content they see on Facebook?
We did listen to people who said you've removed a post of mine and I
don't really understand why and so in that sense this was us responding to
what people were asking for which was more information.
But part of this is also about just being open about
the kind of community we're trying to create.
It's not enough to just connect people.
We have to make sure that those connections are positive.
It's not enough to just give people a voice.
We need to make sure that people aren't using it
to harm other people or to spread misinformation
Facebook is struggling to contain fake news like the so called news recently
that Florida's Parkland students were paid actors.
It circulated widely on Facebook and was patently untrue.
For news that is deemed questionable
Facebook says it will shrink the prominence of those posts on your feed.
Why not label it false? Why not say this is fake?
What we're realizing is that it's actually better
it's more successful and people like it more
If we simply provide them with more context to understand
what they're seeing and how that fits with the other news that is online.
So are you saying people reacted
poorly or negatively towards tagging information that was false when they
thought it was true?
I'm saying that we're testing different approaches to
see what works best and getting people the context of the information they need
to discern whether something is true.
Facebook is still trying to recover
from the U.S. election scandal when it became a tool
for Russian trolls spreading false news.
We know that there were accounts before the 2016 election
that shouldn't have been there.
Those were fake accounts, they were inauthentic
accounts, they didn't belong on Facebook,
and we should have found them faster.
We're developing technical tools
that look for signals that tell us when an
account might be fake.
And now our tools are good enough that there are more than
a million accounts per day that we stop at the time of creation because
we know that they are fake.
A million a day?
Yes.
That's a pretty big number.
This is a sign that our tools are getting much better and that we'll be able to
keep the site much cleaner from this sort of content.
The Canadian government has warned Facebook to be vigilant for fake news
leading up to the Federal election in 2019.
Prime Minister Trudeau met Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg at Davos.
We do know that and the Prime Minister
has said that he has met with Facebook several times,
basically with the same message.
If you don't curb your content better,
then we are going to regulate you more.
Do you expect more regulation?
We'll keep talking to the government but at
the same time our incentives are really aligned.
They want Facebook to be a safe place and so do we.
The job of guarding Facebook
from troubling user content is staggering.
As you heard Susan mention
There are 7500 people worldwide
reviewing content for Facebook.
That is up significantly from last year.
They're members of a team working on safety and security
that the company plans to expand to 20,000 people by the end of the year.
That's a small city of employees
facing toxic images and messages.
and that's just one company.
Twitter and YouTube are wrestling with the same problem.
And that's why Susan looked deeper
at Facebook's 'cleaners.'
The people policing the line between the company's
utopian vision of a more connected world
and from the social networks dark corners
the dystopia that's seeping in.
It is as if Pandora's Box is open and all the evils
on social media are spilling out.
Torture of a mentally handicapped youth
went live on Facebook before it could be stopped.
This man's intent to murder was also posted live on Facebook.
These Canadian University women
suffered violent and sexist posts.
Facebook pulled down 21 million posts of
adult nudity or porn.
And two and a half million examples of hate speech
in just three months this year.
But like a cancer, it keeps coming back.
I was a spam analyst
Sarah Katz worked at Facebook for eight months in 2016.
We met her at the cafe in Palo Alto, California.
Her sole job was to review content.
Up to 8,000 posts a day and decide
whether to pull them down or leave them up.
"Primarily pornography,
sometimes bestiality, child pornography.
There was a lot of that obviously...
the child trafficking was the content that stayed
with me the most."
What did you witness?
It was...
Am I okay to like speak here? -- "Yes."
Okay, I don't want to bother people.
There was a girl she was about 12
and a little boy was like nine
And they were standing facing each other
and they didn't have pants on and there was like
someone off the camera, he was speaking another language
but they were like touching each other.
So he's probably just telling them what to do.
So that was disturbing
because I'd never seen anything like that.
Violent hateful content is rising
As Facebook doubles down on efforts to find it.
"If you look at the the bigger picture
there are lots of horrible things that are happening in the world."
James Mitchell is director of risk and
response at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park California.
Naturally, that behavior begins to manifest itself on Facebook.
Not just there but in a whole
host of other ways.
But people are using Facebook
to manifest these very violent
and toxic things that are happening.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
You just have to live with that?
Because if it's open its open is that the response?
I think the way to look at that is
the content reviewers job is to try to minimize that
and I think that's something that the team
takes a great deal of satisfaction knowing that their job is to minimize
those negative experiences that people might have
I think we certainly see ourselves as as a team
that has the ability to minimize
that harm in the world.
Safe to delete.
Delete.
Ignore.
Delete.
The cost of policing the world's evil are growing.
A new documentary: The Cleaners,
exposes how Facebook hires inexpensive labour
in countries like the Philippines
to monitor content.
An intense job with some nasty side effects.
"I've seen hundreds off bad things."
Until recently this work was mostly in the shadows
The filmmakers say they got no access to Facebook
or the contracting companies who hire the workers offshore.
Their film headlined at Toronto's Hot Docs festival.
"They are hiding the debate,
they are hiding the dilemma they are facing
with building these platforms,
and not feeling responsible for what goes on on these platforms."
Sarah Roberts, an academic at UCLA was a consultant to the filmmakers
"It is the unpleasant underbelly.
It is the necessary evil and it doesn't bring
revenue, it doesn't generate positive affect.
It does the opposite.
It costs money."
Roberts has been tracking content review
in social media for 10 years,
as the volume has just exploded.
We're talking about billions of posts per day
when it comes to Facebook.
We're talking about 400 hours of video content per minute.
24 by 7.
We're talking about YouTube so this amount is vast.
But really even 20,000 workers...
I mean how can they reasonably adjudicate
a platform of billions of users.
The social media giants
are being forced to come clean
and protect against the mental repercussions
of workers looking at millions
of troubling posts everyday.
"You definitely do grow desensitized.
Facebook is very upfront about how you
will be viewing graphic material.
So they have you sign a waiver.
At the time I was there, there was no counselling.
I didn't really personally feel the need
for counseling but I did meet some folks
whom I believe it would have benefited.
We try to ensure that everybody gets and has resources
for psychological counselling.
And that's extraordinarily important,
as we think about the wellness of the people that are working on these issues.
But Mitchell acknowledges the volume of extreme material is rising,
will rise and get more nuanced.
So increasing the numbers of content reviewers
won't solve all the problems.
"The other big wildcard is the way the
world continues to evolve."
Do you think you'll have to be more of a
policeman and less of an open platform?
I think from the perspective of content
reviewers we've always played that policeman role.
So much of what we do when we see is dependent on
what people are sharing and
that's changing every few months
and so that dynamic nature to content that's being shared on
our platform will continue to create challenges for us.
Susan Ormiston, CBC News
Menlo Park, California