Meta says automation wrongly took down No Kings and a Senate candidate’s page. It’s automating more anyway |
Meta says automation wrongly took down No Kings and a Senate candidate’s page. It’s automating more anyway
Meta has spent the last year handing more of its content moderation to artificial intelligence. In the last few weeks, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company has fended off election-interference accusations in Brazil and the U.S. It has largely blamed these errors on its automated systems.
Those accusations have come from a sitting president, a national protest movement and a U.S. Senate candidate. Each landed as Meta, a Fortune 500 company that reported $201 billion in revenue last year, speeds up a shift from human reviewers to large language models.
Meta announced in March that it would roll out more advanced AI content-enforcement systems. By June, large language models had replaced human reviewers for about half of review requests, with a goal of 90% or more automation for some violation categories by the end of 2026, according to the Financial Times. Meta told the paper its models make 13% fewer errors than human reviewers and catch 10% more violations; some employees have warned that the shift is happening too fast with too little oversight.
In 2018, ahead of elections in Brazil and the U.S., Facebook set up a “war room” of more than two dozen experts to fight election interference. Eight years later, both countries are voting again, and Meta now calls its war room the Election Operations Center. But more of the work of policing its platforms has shifted from people to software.
According to an October report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization, platforms are increasingly relying on “crowdsourced and automated systems” rather than human oversight. The report found that platforms have disclosed little about how these systems work or are tested, and said: “relying on them as the primary means of oversight during a fast-moving election cycle remains an untested proposition.”
This fall’s cases show what happens when those systems misfire in the middle of an election, and why Meta’s explanations have satisfied few affected people.
Meta did not respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
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