Facebook’s content moderation services are already highly complex; ensuring a certain standard for the site and its ever growing list of content provided by users has proven to be difficult over the years, and is thought to be part of the reason why they have experienced a recent dip in their userbase as people turn to social media sites that have proven themselves more capable of addressing issues swiftly.
Now, however, it has announced new plans to utilise artificial intelligence in place of the thousands of content moderators used to maintain the site’s standards. Read more below.
Is AI New for Content Curation?
The utilisation of AI in digital content curation is not a new idea, and has been put to good use for a number of years now – particularly as the sheer volume of quality content continues to grow exponentially.
In the world of online gaming, for instance, many casino sites are turning to AI as a way of personalising the homepages of their sites for users, and ensuring that the latest casino games from the most popular casino software developers can be organised in a way that the individual player will find appealing.
Similarly, AI is frequently deployed by TV and movie streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Over time, they observe individual users’ viewing habits and conflate it together in order to observe patterns and trends; in this way they can recommend new content to users based on their (and millions of others’) watch history.
This is one of the most valuable means for remaining strong against competitors; if Netflix’s homepage continued to take an impersonal approach toward recommending content, and simply advertised its own content to us with no context, we would lose a great deal of time to scrolling through its vast digital library, and soon lose interest in the service altogether.
Similarly, Spotify is well-known for utilising an incredibly intricate AI-based algorithm for content recommendation. Their data collection goes beyond their own services, and scours the wider web for further understanding of music, its creators, and the listeners themselves.
In terms of social media, Instagram is already using AI for content organisation. And, while it is not able to boast the same size of userbase as Facebook, it has not seen the same decline as Facebook over the past few years.
What is Facebook Hoping to Achieve?
Much of Facebook’s motivation for investing into its content curation and moderation likely stems from the technology’s effectual use in many other areas of online entertainment and social media.
The social media giant’s userbase has waned in recent years, particularly over the past few months; it was reported recently that, in the US and Canada alone, active users dropped by two million between the second and third quarter – and they are expecting this drop to continue throughout the final months of the year.
By utilising advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to the same extent shown by competitors, and others operating within the online entertainment and streaming industry, they may well be able to bring the site forward and demonstrate a propensity to keep up with the broader standards of their entire potential userbase.
The online landscape is continually changing, and Facebook’s recent losses demonstrate that even longstanding leaders render themselves vulnerable if they are unable to keep pace with these evolving habits and approaches toward content curation and moderation. It is only by embracing the most advanced methodologies and technologies that any site or service can hope to continue on as a worthy opponent to the biggest names in the industry.
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