Newsweek has published an interesting article ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ about fighting against the adult and other unwanted content at Facebook and its biggest competitor MySpace. The article is very fresh and its reflects main issues with content moderation at social networks. However, one important thing attracted my attention. Nick Summers, an author of that article, made an example on the typical work of the content moderator at Facebook. The example contains following phrase:
After delivering a verdict on 75 of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by Facebook users… …Axten is off to a meeting. It’s just another day at the office of the world’s fastest-growing social-networking site.
And another one:
The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.
In my words, it means following from the point of view of CEO, COO, CFO and CMO:
- 150 people are paid regularly for doing the manual work and Facebook pays all taxes, social insurance, operational expenses and overheads for the team of 150 people.
- No doubts, 150 people can do much more for Facebook than doing that very monotonous work
- 150 of 850 people are in content moderation, which means that more than 17% of the whole team is making this strange manual work.
- Those 150 people can moderate 150*75=11,250 images of more than 400,000 outstanding images, which is less than 3% of daily demands. If you know ISO9001, it is 3x times less than 10%
- The results of their work are far from what is good, because of the performance and because they process images which flagged by Facebook users. How many other images among billions at Faceboook are not flagged?
I am not criticising Facebook. Same issues exist in all other companies running public web services, including MySpace. It reminds the history of the industrial progress: in 18 century most of the work has been done by people. Then machines arise. It is very strange that managers in IT still think in terms of 18 century.
So I would recommend a simple thing for them: just count everything and finally think that maybe it is better to use piFilter as the automatic detection tool, which covers 100% and does not need social taxes, overheads and operational expenses.
Alexander, this estimation is very interesting, however, you consider the biggest companies. What can you say about small business, for instance, photo hosting service?
Of course, it depends on the size. If you have the small website with less than 200 uploads per day, you may use manual moderation. At the same time, if you have a website with, e.g., 2000 uploads per day, then you can probably have a typical issue. You cannot afford payouts to the special employee to check the content, but you have to perform moderation. In that case the automatic procedure looks attractive. Because we offer the service in a manner of SaaS model, you pay only for its usage. So you may first try, then estimate your actual needs and make a decision.