Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Facebook has always made it clear it wants artificial intelligence to handle more moderation duties on its platforms. Today, it announced its latest step toward that goal: putting machine learning in charge of its moderation queue.
Here’s how moderation works on Facebook. Posts that are thought to violate the company’s rules (which includes everything from spam to hate speech and content that “glorifies violence”) are flagged, either by users or machine learning filters. Some very clear-cut cases are dealt with automatically (responses could involve removing a post or blocking an account, for example) while the rest go into a queue for review by human moderators.
Facebook employs about 15,000 of these moderators around the world, and…