Facebook's leaked threat guidance for moderators makes more sense than people think

Facebook's controversial guidance for moderators isn't as ill-conceived as many people believe, according to a forensic linguist whose work on threat and language analysis helps the police convict criminals. Leaked internal documents revealed that the site's moderators are instructed to delete certain threats but leave others up, depending on how "credible" they are. They were heavily criticised and widely considered to be confusing, with some people branding the guidance as counterintuitive. "There was nothing [in the leaked slides] that struck me as being completely in the wrong direction," Aston University's Professor Tim Grant told The Independent. "It all makes sense in a simplistic way. There's nothing that makes you think'that's completely wrong'. It's the idea that there can be simple criteria that is worrying. Threat analysis is a bit more complicated than this."