Facebook commonly relied on users to report offensive content on the social media platform, with the planned development of AI to seek out this content; Facebook would be able to flag these offensive materials.
Facebook has been enmeshed in content moderation this past year including an outcry from the international community for removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity. The social media platform site, lately, has also been charged with allowing the promulgation of fake news on its platform, according to Reuters.
Joaquin Candela, Facebook company director of applied machine learning declared, Facebook is currently working to flag offensive live video streams and building an effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content. Speaking to reporters, Candela describes the artificial intelligence Facebook employs to filter out offensive content as, "an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies."
With this development, Facebook is extending the use of artificial intelligence to flag offensive live videos. The move is still in the research stage and they have identified two challenges, according to Candela.
He states that the computer vision algorithm has to be fast as if it was human looking at the stream. It also needs to analyze and understand if the content violates their policies to allow the system to take the stream down, according to Daily Mail.
Currently, Facebook said it also uses the automation in processing tens of millions of reports the platform receives each week. The system also recognizes duplicate reports and route these flagged content to reviewers possessing expertise on the appropriate subject matter.
Addressing the issue of fake news, Yann LeChun, Facebook's director of AI research, declined to issue a statement on where the company stands on using AI to detect fake news. However, LeChun stated that improvements place questions of tradeoffs that differentiate filtering and censorship, freedom of expressions, decency, and truthfulness.
