Facebook's redoubled AI efforts won't stop the spread of harmful content

Facebook says it's using AI to prioritize potentially problematic posts for human moderators to review as it works to more quickly remove content that violates its community guidelines. The social media giant previously leveraged machine learning models to proactively take down low-priority content and left high-priority content reported by users to human reviewers. But Facebook claims it now combines content identified by users and models into a single collection before filtering, ranking, and deduplicating it and handing it off to thousands of moderators, many of whom are contract employees. Facebook's continued investment in moderation comes as reports suggest the company is failing to stem the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech on its platform. Reuters recently found over three dozen pages and groups that featured discriminatory language about Rohingya refugees and undocumented migrants.