Facebook To Let French Regulators Investigate On Moderation Processes

Facebook and the French government are working together to look at the social media company's efforts to moderate content on its site. 'At the start of 2019, French regulators will launch an informal investigation on algorithm-powered and human moderation,' reports TechCrunch. 'Facebook is willing to cooperate and give unprecedented access to its internal processes.' From the report: Regulators will look at multiple steps: how flagging works, how Facebook identifies problematic content, how Facebook decides if it's problematic or not and what happens when Facebook takes down a post, a video or an image. This type of investigation is reminiscent of banking and nuclear regulation. It involves deep cooperation so that regulators can certify that a company is doing everything right.

It's still unclear who's going to be in charge of this investigation. There could be regulators from France's telecom regulator (ARCEP), from the government's tech team (DINSIC), from the TV and radio regulator (CSA)... There's one thing for sure, the French government wants to focus on hate speech for now, so don't expect anyone from the privacy regulator (CNIL). The investigation isn't going to be limited to talking with the moderation teams and looking at their guidelines. The French government wants to find algorithmic bias and test data sets against Facebook's automated moderation tools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.