I don't really disagree with you, but I can't even imagine what "hire a whole bunch of people." looks like in this case, the numbers would be enormous I would think.
Facebook’s 30 000 moderators is problematic as it’s a pit of human misery, with basically fresh souls sent down the mine as canaries to detected hurtful content.
Even looking away from the human aspect a second, it means these 30 000 are not stable employees but contractors needed to be replaced very frequently, burning through the pool of potential workers. And people are not even happy with the current number and clamour for way more moderation on facebook, so the 30 000 number is by cheaping out.
Then Youtube need people both for moderating and copyright/monetarization support so multiply by 2, and for facebook and youtube we’d need close to a roster of 100 000 people rotating every year or less, burning through a million people in a decade.
All of that just for two video platforms on the internet.
I can’t stop myself from wondering if it’s a good use of people.
Lots of sites are driven by volunteer moderation - an admittedly risky prospect, but in most of those cases where it goes really wrong it seems like the site is functionally 100% volunteer driven.
A big corp could take a mixed approach. For every paid admin you can have dozens of volunteers whose authority and actions are supervised by the paid admins, and the admins and moderators would also have access to the AI tools to see flags on the content.
This could be a good model for Youtube Kids - whitelisting channels and individual videos as age-appropriate. If the admin sees a moderator abusing the privilege, let them revoke it and revert their entire history.
And I don't disagree with you but the parent company is ginormous and the monetary sums almost unfathomable. Its revenues may comfortably support an enormous number of well-paying jobs.
Alphabet's revenues are already supporting those jobs, though. People don't go to Google to do useful work, they go because the owners are hoarders and like collecting engineers to keep them in a zoo and stop them from starting competitors.
Thus Google will hire Vint Cerf because they think he's cool, even though he's not going to contribute anything, but what forum moderator is cool enough for a PhD hoarder to keep around?
AI flags anything that could be suspicious, human moderator reviews the exact circumstances of anything flagged.
Google is one of the largest tech companies on the planet, if anyone can solve "impossible" problems its them.
But not if they are lacking internal impetus to change anything.
