The difficulty of trying to moderate content is hard to comprehend

Moderating content on social media is incredibly difficult. People love to complain about it, and it’s indeed imperfect, but it’s a tough system. I shared the story of Chole before, but I recently came across a great article from Techdirt that gives some amazing statistics.

In a recent a talk from Evelyn Douek, a Lecturer on Law & Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School, she helped shape the scale of what social media companies are up against. During the course of her 30 minute talk:

• Facebook would take down 615,417 pieces of content
• YouTube would take down 271,440 videos, channels, and comments
• TikTok would take down 18,870 videos
• The Facebook Oversight Board would receive 48 petitions to review a takedown decision.

Those numbers are big enough, but you need to remember two more things:

1. Those are just for a 30 minute chunk. We’re talking about 29 million pieces of content that Facebook removes every day.
2. This doesn’t get into the amount of content that is reviewed and allowed to stay. Moderators and algorithms undoubtedly review and allow at least that much more content.

The answer?