The Absurdity of Content Moderation

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Because it's so interesting to take podcast or um um

(00:04):
presentation that came out years ago about the troubles Facebook
ran into when they started trying to I don't like
the words censor has so many connotations to it, to
try to weed out stuff that they knew nobody wanted
on the platform to moderate to moderate. Ellen just said,
there's gonna be some moderation. We'll go through some of this.

(00:25):
It's about the Facebook site integrity team when they started
trying to moderate on Facebook. So the site integrity team,
the twelve people at the time, they realized they had
to start spelling out exactly what they meant precisely. All
of these people at Facebook were in charge of trying
to define unity. So I mean, yeah, the first cut
out it was visible male and female genitalia, and then

(00:48):
visible female breasts, and then the question is, well, okay,
how much of a breast needs to be showing before
it's nude. And the thing that we landed on was
if you could see essentially the nipple and ariola, than
that's nudity and it would have to be taken down,
which theoretically at least would appease these protesters because you know,
now when a picture would pop up of a mother breastfeeding,

(01:11):
as long as the child was blocking the view of
the nipple in the area that they could say cool,
no problem. The protesters they referred to as early in Facebook,
when they still only had ten million users as opposed
to half the planet. Uh, there was a giant protest
out in front of the Facebook headquarters from moms who

(01:32):
wanted to be able to tweet or put post pictures
on Facebook of them breastfeeding, and those had been taken
down because it was considered nudity, and they protested, and
of course Mark Zuckerberg, the last thing he wanted to
be was anything that that people on the left didn't like,
So they had to start down the road of moderating,
and as you heard, there got complicated, and it continues.

(01:52):
Then you start getting pictures that are women with just
their babies on their chest, with their breasts bear like
for example, maybe baby was sleeping on the chest of
a bare breasted woman and not actively breastfeeding. Okay, now
what like, is this actually breastfeeding? No, it's actually not breastfeeding.
The woman is just holding the baby and she has
her top off, but she was clearly just breastfeeding the

(02:13):
baby well liked before, Well, I would say it's sort
of like kicking a soccer ball. Like a photo of
someone who has just kicked a soccer ball, you can
tell the ball is in the air, but there's no
contact between the foot and the ball in that moment potentially,
so although it is a photo of someone kicking a
soccer ball, they are not in fact kicking the soccer
ball in that photo. And this, this became the procedure

(02:37):
or the protocol or the approach for all these things
was we have to base it purely on what we
can see in the image. And so it didn't allow
that to stay up under the rules because it could
be too easily exploited for other types of content like
nudity or pornography. Right, So that settled it, and they
figured it out completely. So if you had a baby
in the picture, you can show your your nude body, well,

(03:00):
obviously that wasn't gonna fly. It goes on. We got
to the only way you could objectively say that the
baby and the mother were engaged in breastfeeding is if
the baby's lips were touching the woman's nipple. So they
included what you could call like an attachment clause. But
as soon as they got that rule in place, like
you would see, you know, a twenty five year old
woman and a teenage looking boy, right, and like, what

(03:22):
the hell is going on there? Oh yeah, it gets
really weird if you like start entering into like child age.
And it wasn't even going to bring that up because
it's kind of grass. It's like breastfeeding porn ap yes
there is, and or people that liked taking advantage of
it because there's a lot of trolls out there. Okay,
you'll allow breastfeeding. So now we got a you know,

(03:42):
a nineteen year old boy who's latched onto the dimple
of a grown up woman and getting trouble. So then
you got to figure out what's the right age. Okay,
here we go. And so this team they realized they
needed to have a nudity rule that allowed for breastfeeding,
but also had so kind of an age cop so
so so then we were saying, okay, once you've progressed

(04:05):
past infancy, then we believe that it's inappropriate. But then
pictures would start popping up on their screen and they'd
be like, wait, is that an infant? Like where's the
line between infant and toddler? And so the thing that
we landed on was if it looked like the child
could walk on his or her own, then too old,
big enough to walk, too big to breasting. That's like, yeah,
that's like a year old in some cases. Yeah, And

(04:27):
like the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding until you know,
like eighteen months or two years, which meant there were
a lot of photos still being taken down within you know, days,
were continuing to hear reports from people that their photographs
were still being targeted, and an attempt to keep pictures
off on Facebook of nineteen year old college dudes latched

(04:51):
onto the nipple of some grown woman. Well, not to
get off on a tangent, but you remember that one
boss of mine whose wife was breastfeeding her kid at
at like age seven. Yeah, that was yeah, Michael, That's
how everybody reacted. The first time you saw it was like, wait,
what am I seeing? What I think I'm seeing? Yeah,
I don't know who am I to judge. I don't

(05:12):
want to get too far off track here, but I
just I just I've never understood the the enthusiasm for
breastfeeding in public sure, you should be allowed. It's perfectly natural.
I don't recoil in horror or think it's awful of
my kid seat or anything like that, But I don't
personally know. Well, I know a couple of hippies who
are enthusiastic about that. They would rather do it in public,

(05:32):
it would seem to me than in private. But almost
every other mom I've known, including the mother of my children,
preferred to like be in the car or another room
where there aren't there's nobody around that's gonna be looking
at him. The I really want to do it in
public because I have the right crowd is just all
right whatever, you know, that's funny. He doesn't bother me
at all. In fact, frequently I've approached breastfeeding women with

(05:54):
a nice hot cup of coffee in my end and said, hey,
I'd like a little milk in this dam I geez,
that's the worst thing I've ever heard, but not the
worst thing that's ever been on Facebook. So they moved
from nudity to other stuff like violence. And so this
small team at Facebook got a little bigger and bigger,
jumped up to sixty people and then a hundred, and

(06:15):
they set out to create rules and definitions for everything.
Can we go through some of sort of the ridiculous
examples we're here, Okay, so gore gore? You mean violence?
Kind yes, So the gore standard was headline, we don't
allow graphic violence and gore. And then the shorthand definition
they used was no insides on the outside, no guts,

(06:37):
no blood pouring out of something. Blood was a separate issue.
There was an excessive blood rule. They had to come
up with rules about bodily fluid seamen, for example, would
be allowed in like a clinical setting, but like, what
does the clinical setting mean? And you know, does that
mean if someone is in a lab code. I'm on
the mucous subcommittee of the Facebook Gore Patrol. And then

(07:01):
one more category and we can discuss. And so from
then on, as they run into problems, those rules just
constantly get updated with constant amendments. Yeah, constant amendments, new problem,
new rule, another new problem, updated rule. In fact, at
this point they they're amending these rules up to twenty
times a month. Wow. Really, Take for example, those rules

(07:25):
about breastfeeding. In they removed the attachment clause, so the
baby no longer needed to have its mouth physically touching
the nipple of the woman, and in fact one nipple
and or ariola could be visible in the photo, but
not too too much for obvious reasons. So if you

(07:50):
want to listen to that whole thing, it's fascinating, and
we have the whole thing at our website Armstrong and
Getty dot com. At the very beginning, they point out
that so Mark zuckerbur because as as I always say,
this doesn't this isn't talked about enough. It was a
freaking accident that he ended up a billionaire, so he
had no plan for all of this obviously. Um, So

(08:11):
they assembled a team with just like a few people
when they realized, oh well, they had the breastfeeding uh
protesters outside their gates, and oh no, we've got we're
getting national controversy for being mean to moms and want
to breastfeed. We don't want to be that, And that's
how they started down the road to this, And they
just grabbed a few people that had been there, Like
it says in the podcast, they were assigned to the
project because they've been there for nine months, as opposed

(08:34):
to the people at Facebook that had been there for
nine days. So they chose these eight people to decide
what should be allowed on the and they would go
through one picture at a time. And you know, as
Facebook grew, that became a problem of scale, and but
they needed more and more people as the problems got
more and more complicated. Violence to you allow violence? Of
course you doing a lot of violence. What about war?

(08:54):
You want to be able to have wars with that's news? Okay,
that kind of violence? What's war? What's not a war?
Bab blah blah blah blah. What's a time that people
should know about? What is just posting for gratuitous reasons?
I don't know, But these are the problems that Elan
is going to run into. I think Ellen will have
the the advantage of not caring about tying himselves into
knots to appease every political, politically correct group out there.

(09:17):
He'll have that way, man, That's that's quality number one
he's going to bring to it. Yeah, but it's still
a problem. I like the discussion of what defines art too,
which is always you know, a vexing problem for mankind.
But yeah, so you get into that as well. What
if I have art depicting terrible violence to illustrate the
needlessness of war. You know that sort of thing. I
take that down. If if a guy is pardon the expression,

(09:42):
if a guy has taken a dump on a picture
of Putin? Is that art? It is? But I'm not
gonna hang it in my living room.