
Instagram has a massive harassment problem - DarkContinent
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/instagram-has-massive-harassment-problem/572890/
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biophysboy
I have a question: what is the most effective way for a social platform to
prevent harassment? Every relevant social platform has a harassment problem.
People are mean; relative anonymity & tribalism make it worse.

This article offers no new solutions. Ramp up reporting and moderation?
Instagram services a billion people. Even if Facebook multiplied their
moderation team by a 100, they still would be drowning in information.

Considering the scale of this issue, I can see why these engineers are
deferring to their idée fixe - machine learning. I guess I'm just skeptical.
What are they going to do? Have a team (arbitrarily?) identify harassment by
eye and use it as training data? That sounds like a draconian recipe for
disaster. At the very least, its insufficient. Identifying harassment is not
the same as identifying a street sign; it often requires the context of
complex, offline interactions or shared info between two people. A friend
asking "When can I see you again?" is fine. A stalker asking the same thing?
Not so much.

I really want harassment to be solved. I hate that the internet is like this.
But this problem would exist even without platform negligence.

