AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, but Can It Finish? | Wired

Tangentially, see Facebook still hasn’t launched a big privacy feature that Mark Zuckerberg promised more than seven months ago | Recode

"Counting on AI is a gamble. Algorithms have proved capable of helping to police Facebook, but they are far from a cure-all—and may never be. The company has had great success in detecting and blocking pornography and nudity. But training software to reliably decode text is much more difficult than categorizing images. To tamp down harassment, hate speech, and dangerous conspiracy theories across its vast platform, Facebook needs AI systems capable of understanding the shifting nuances of more than 100 different languages. Any shortfalls must be caught by Facebook’s roughly 15,000 human reviewers, but at the social network’s scale it’s unclear how manageable their workload will be. As events in Myanmar showed, gaps in the enforcement net that may look small from Menlo Park can feel dangerously large to people whose world is being shaped by Facebook."

AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, but Can It Finish? | Wired