Under the compelling headline “The labourers who keep dick pics and beheadings out of your Facebook feed”, journalist Adrien Chen delved last year into the little-known world of social media’s content moderators. These thousands of workers, most based in Asia, trawl through social networking sites in order to delete or flag offensive content. In the process, they are exposed to the very worst the internet has to offer – beheadings, violent pornography, images of abuse – all for wages as low as $300 a month.
But this month, Twitter has taken a first step towards automating this process, and thus sparing a huge unseen workforce from their daily bombardment of horrors. Almost exactly a year ago, Twitter bought start-up Madbits, which offers, in the words of its co-founders, a “visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organises and extracts relevant information from raw media”.
At the time, tech websites speculated that the Madbits would be used to develop facial recognition or tagging on Twitter photos. But in fact, the start-up’s first task was very different: it was instructed by Alex Roetter, Twitter’s head of engineering, to build a system which could find and filter out offensive images, defined by the company as “not safe for work”.
This month, Wired reported that these artificial intelligence (AI) moderators are now up and running. Roetter claims the new moderator-bots can filter out 99 per cent of offensive imagery. They also tend to incorrectly identify about 7 per cent of acceptable images as offensive – but, the company reasons, better safe than sorry.
Like other artificial intelligence robots, the moderator “learns” how to spot offensive imagery by analysing reams of pornography and gore, and then applies its knowledge of the content and patterns to new material. Over time, the system continues to learn, and get even better at spotting NSFW images. Soon, systems like these could replace content moderation farms altogether.
In most cases like these, it’s worth remembering those whose jobs might be lost as the robots advance, especially in developing countries – but considering the psychological damage brought on by endless exposure to violent images, we can only hope Twitter and sites like it can offer less distressing moderation jobs (and higher salaries) to these workers instead.
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