To take one example: Banning racists requires that you have a clear, well-understood but also nuanced view about what is incitement, dog-whistle, free speech, etc. Having large teams enforce those require that everyone in those teams understand those rules and apply them fairly. In those divided times, I challenge you to find anyone able to articulate the agenda both the American Left and the American Right coherently. So you can have multiple people review, but will you get a decision without a process that most people will find deeply wrong?

In addition, they have to be international which opens even bigger cans of worms. Casey Newton has great reporting on the centres that handle those; I strongly recommend you read those — with the provision that you realise Facebook doesn’t manage those centres, they are contractors, so Facebook also has to make complicated decisions about how to insure those centres are not abusing their staff, performance is properly rewarded, etc. without overstepping. You can imagine, say, gender relations among a group of people who speak certain languages ::cough::indi ::cough::. Now find me Burmese-speaking people who think that the rules about human-rights also apply to Rohingya. Or how to realise that your team dealing with gender-related issues is managed by TERFs? How do you manage for all of those if you’ve never heard of Abkhazia, how language and castes interlace in India, the religious dimension of the conflict in Somaliland, common forms of gaslighting about ethnic relations in China? The goal is not for you to know it all, but how do you set-up processes to not be blind to the fact that the prejudice is already in your (contractor’s) house?

Also, on occasion, those rules have to be legally enforceable. Say you have a friend who lives in Turkey, or in Germany, it is legal for you to comment on their post saying that Ataturk was a little bitch, or that Hitler was a great man? Well, it might not legal for them to read it… So do you hide? Do you add a message to say that you hid something?

What is simple is that engaging with shoot-from-the-hip, Facebook-is-bad comments will never end up in a better place.