The Facebook insider building content moderation for the AI era
Moonbounce has raised $12 million to grow its AI control engine that converts content moderation policies into consistent, predictable AI behavior.
When Brett Levenson left Apple in 2019 to lead business integrity at Facebook, the social media giant was in the thick of the Cambridge Analytica fallout. At the time, he thought he could simply fix Facebook’s content moderation problem with better technology.
The problem, he quickly learned, ran deeper than technology. Human reviewers were expected to memorize a 40-page policy document that had been machine-translated into their language, he said. Then they had about 30 seconds per piece of flagged content to decide not just whether that content violated the rules, but what to do about it: block it, ban the user, limit the spread. Those quick calls were only “slightly better than 50% accurate,” according to Levenson.
“It was kind of like flipping a coin, whether the human reviewers could actually address policies correctly, and this was many days after the harm had already occurred anyway,” Levenson told TechCrunch.
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