Facebook to Allow User Policing
Posted Tuesday 5th January 2010 by Ben J in Social Media.
Moderating community sites such as internet forums is a largely thankless task; as a rule, users don’t like being told what they can or can’t talk about on the internet, and social networking sites such as Facebook are largely not much different. However, a site such as Facebook will naturally be much more difficult for moderators purely due to the size of it and the activity levels of its users. With over 350 million active members spending an average of 55 minutes a day on the site, that’s a lot of content to review.
Although Facebook has a moderation team in place which numbers into the hundreds, that’s still an almost impossible workload and clearly mistakes and controversial decisions will be made such as the recent decision to take down pictures of a breast cancer survivor’s mastectomy scars. Now, however, Facebook are doing what could be considered the unthinkable: letting its users police content.
Though Facebook has long allowed users to post complaints about groups or posts, the advent of the Facebook Community Council is a much larger step in the direction of user-moderated content. More of an app than an official ‘moderatorship’, its aim is to completely remove nudity, drugs, violence and spam which it does by Council members ‘tagging’ pieces of content which they find with one of eight phrases: Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Spam, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough members tag the piece as unacceptable, action will be taken, usually in the form of taking it down.
Putting this kind of tedious task into the hands of the users is a good way of relieving the workload of what must be a very busy moderation team at Facebook, but it’s difficult not to imagine it being open to abuse as the Community Council opens its doors and allows everyone to become a member.
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