Last year, I mentioned that I was one of about 350 people tapped to participate in Facebook Community Council, an experiment in crowdsourced content moderation. We’d slog through profiles and sites tagged as inappropriate by other users (tags included nudity, attacking, drugs, and violence). And there were plenty of each, especially the first two. A million tags later, we got the following notice (verbatim):
Thank you for participating in the Facebook Community Council.We will be shutting down starting this week, and will let you knowwhen we start another experiment.
Despite my fifth-place showing, I was not awarded a prize. I suspect they now have image and text recognition algorithms that make mere humans ineffective except in the more subtle forms of abuse. Over time, we saw a lot less penis and puke pics and “___ sucks” Facebook groups, and a lot more subtle trolling of middle and high school students and teachers. It was certainly interesting to see what garden-variety low-level trolling looks like these days. There were a lot of similarities to Wikipedia vandalism: a lot of one-off drive-by crap, with a few people fixated on gaming the system in ever more subtle ways.