Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

To muse a bit: a city of 2 billion would need a lot more administrators than just 200 000.

Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that current user:moderator ratio is very obviously insufficient.

In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.

Taking a random large city as an example, New York City has over 300k employees [1], which is a 25:1 ratio with population. The Police department has 55k employees [2], which is a 151:1 ratio with population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

This is the incisive observation on this topic.

No society with numbers north of somewhere in the two digits works without some kind of rules, administration, and enforcement. I'll bet you there are at least half a million people staffing courts in the US, maybe even a full million, and probably an equal number of law enforcement officers, and that doesn't get to public and private attorneys which is probably another million.

Which means something like 1% of the population of the US is probably involved in just administering the laws of society.

Now, maybe for a society where the limits of how people interact is communication you could get away with lower overhead. But that's going to be a constant factor of the same underlying dynamic.

Also, we've done the same damn thing with freedom of discourse that we have with almost every other liberty in the US: we turn it into a thought-stopping cliche and glide on treating it as an indulgence rather than investing in thinking about the limits, edge cases, and responsibilities.

There’s no need for a specific class of meta-mods. Just use the same system as Slashdot: periodically throw a random moderator’s decision in front of another mod. Ask them if the decision was fair. A portion of the bad decisions will get reported and screened.

If all mods are routinely screening each other’s work, everyone has an incentive to be fair. Biased mod decisions are thus a risk to your continued employment because you know your work is spot-checked.

If meta moderators are at the same scale then that’s only 200 meta moderators and only 1 meta meta. The base of a log scaling pyramid is approximately as large as the entire pyramid.

Wouldn't that be 20 meta moderators (10k:1 scale), rather than 200?

You’re right, apologies!

Where's the problem in that? FB makes 18.5 billion $ a year in profit. 250k employees @ 30k would work out to 7.5 billion $ in cost a year, it would hardly leave them bankrupt.

Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.

First, it’s $7.5 billion freaking dollars. Of OpEx.

Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff. They’re not paying $7.5 bil to just allow people to post whatever content they want now! Very quickly they will run out obviously clear-cut cases and will be moderating anything and everything under the sun.

How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic... I cannot imagine.

> First, it’s $7.5 billion freaking dollars. Of OpEx.

So what? If that cost is necessary to run a platform that is safe for those who are on it (= from spammers, catfishers, threats, pedophiles or right-wing extremists) and that does not serve as a breeding ground for threats for society (= "freemen"/"Reichsbürger" groups, militias, neo-Nazis, antisemites, Qanon, ...), then this cost should be paid by the ones making the profit (=Facebook), not society.

> Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff.

So what? The digital equivalent of police(wo)men on patrol. Just because it's The Internet, it should not be a free-for-all land.

> How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic

The US alone has nearly 700k police officers for 300M people, that are running around with guns and regularly kill people, and yet society accepts this.

If FB charged money, it would totally change their business model, and I believe that could solve some of the issues. However, I have to wonder if people would actually be willing to pay money for FB? It's easier to quit something when you just have to stop paying them. They might get a lot smaller if they charged money.

I think it's far worse than even this. Facebook reportedly receives over 50000 posts per second on average. With 200000 moderators, each one would have to read a post every 4 seconds every hour of every day. I would place the number of human moderators at least an order of magnitude higher.

I don't want strangers looking at the content I post to my friends. Full stop.

Snowden made it pretty clear that they already are.

> already were

Fixed that. Maybe some nefarious three-letter agency found another way, maybe not. Even if they did, they have a powerful incentive never to let it be known. And it's still almost entirely algorithmic.

On the other hand, human moderators are inherently going to be entry-level individuals in a call center in a low-wage country. These are not the same things.

How would you feel about human moderation of your email?

Seems logical if you're using their stuff, they get to do anything they want with what you put there. Expect them to read every word, and use it to make money.

You are right that this is the status quo.

But I do have to say that it is neither how the law works in many places, not is it ethically correct.

I agree with you, which is why I don't use platforms like Facebook at all.