Facebook Turns to Its Users to Weed Out Offensive Content

Facebook may not be the biggest site on the planet, but it's certainly the most connected. It's also the biggest place for user-generated content on the web. The problem with user-generated content is that it needs to be moderated in one form or another. But with 350 million users, it's easy to understand the amount of work necessary to weed out the objectionable content. In order to help out with the gargantuan task, Facebook is turning to its most valuable asset, the users, and the social network is now testing a crowd-sourced model of content moderation.

The social network has created the Facebook Community Council, which is currently in private testing, a feature which enables users to rate content reported by others as potentially objectionable by placing it into one of the eight categories available like, Spam, Drugs, Attacking (“direct attacks against non public figures”), Acceptable and so on.

"The Facebook Community Council is a way for users to tell us whether reported content violates our policies. We’ve found that people aren’t shy about reporting content they come across that looks suspicious, and this is just another way of leveraging the Facebook community to help maintain the site’s trusted environment. It’s still in an experimental stage, and we’re currently testing the application with only a very small number of users," the company told InsideFacebook.

The tool is actually a Facebook app and is designed to enable the social network to work through huge number of reports in little time. The app takes into account the options which users choose for the content and when enough users have weighed in it makes an automatic decision based on the predominant opinion. The idea is to purge Facebook of objectionable content while also making sure to skip the submissions of overly sensitive users.

Facebook currently employs hundreds of people to handle the task and go through the submissions, but its getting increasingly hard to keep up with the rising number of users. The social network has more than doubled the number of users in just one year and this model can't scale at this size. This isn't the first time the site has turned to its users for help, two years ago the company launched a community-driven translation effort which resulted in Facebook being available in over 70 languages at this point.