> as long as everyone else is doing it too

That right there never ceases to amaze me. How everybody just willingly joins knowing they’re hurting themselves but out of the need to be in the loop with everybody else.

I’d say you hit the nail on the head. Crazy things indeed.

TLDR: $6.25M is all it would cost to implement Orwellian censorship across Facebook.

TFA says there are "hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year." Let us assume there are a million false positives that require human intervention every year. There are 50 work weeks in the year, so to resolve 1,000,000 false positives over 50 weeks requires humans to resolve an average of 20000 per week, or 4000 per day, or 500 per hour, or 125 every 15 minutes.

Therefore, a team of 125 people could theoretically solve this problem by resolving 1 false positive every 15 minutes. At $50,000 US dollar pay scale, Facebook would need to pay out $6.25 million dollars to solve this.

Therefore, given "a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year," it would cost FB ~$6.25M to hire a team of 125 people to resolve the issue, per million false positives.

That seems economical for a multi-billion dollar company.

Facebook already employs 15,000 content moderators, both directly and via contractors. By many accounts, they're overworked and don't get enough time to deal emotionally with what they have to see [1] -- and they only review a fraction of the content on Facebook. 125 people would clearly be many orders of magnitude too small to review everything.

The "hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives" quote is referring to the rate after human moderation (and is also just speculation by the author).

I think people tend to underestimate the scale that would be required to solve this problem because they tend to underestimate just how terrible people are.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat...

A lot of those false positives are going to be things that look very much like a true positive to an underpaid, overworked moderator. I don't think 15 minutes would cut it. Actually, I'm not convinced that any amount of time would, because there are too many occasions when the distinction between hate speech that must be banned and social justice speech that only a bigot would ban rests entirely on the social standing of the person making it within the appropriate circles.

Also, I strongly suspect that Google, Facebook, etc are already applying this kind of manual scrutiny to potential false positives behind the scenes - as you say, it's relatively cheap - and this explains a lot of the problems people have been having with their moderation decisions and why appealing decisions so rarely works out.

It will not be only the ones whose post was removed as a false positive asking for a manual review.

>I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical".

Well yes, that is the definition of unpractical more or less. (Have you ever heard anyone say impractical and not just mean ecomomically unviable?)