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FORTUNE.COM // APR.1.19
ligence, to clean up its act. A.I., says Schroep
fer, is more accurate than humans. He says
Facebook’s A.I. system was 93.77% sure the
picture on the left was marijuana and 88.39%
sure that the picture on the right was broccoli.
And it’s faster by far than a human. “It took
you more than a second,” he says. The com
pany’s technology “can do this in hundredths
of milliseconds, billions of times a day.”
People are as much a part of Facebook’s
solutions to its problems as computers. It has
tripled its number of content moderators,
contractors it hires to monitor postings in
Facebook’s News Feed section, from 10,000
in 2017 to 30,000 today. At the higher end
of the organizational chart, Facebook also
has beefed up the hiring and redeploying of
experts who address specific issues with the
information its users see. Molly Cutler, Face
book’s former associate general counsel, now
leads a “strategic response” team that meets
weekly with chief operating officer Sheryl
Sandberg. Samidh Chakrabarti, the company’sis used and have control,” and Facebook will
build them products to give them that control.
Says Zuckerberg: “We need to go do that.”W
“ WHICH ONE OF THESE is broccoli and which one
is marijuana?”
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technol
ogy officer, is pointing to two sidebyside
images on his laptop, asking me to identify the
“good” from the “bad.” The answer isn’t obvi
ous. Both pictures look convincingly cannabis
like—dense, leafygreen buds that are coated
with miniature, hairlike growths, or perhaps
mold. Finally, I make a semieducated guess:
“The one on the left is marijuana?” Schroepfer
nods approvingly.
The demo is an illustration of how Facebook
is using technology, specifically artificial intelNOT STANDING STILL:
Mark Zuckerberg (center)
at the European Parliament
in Brussels in May 2018.Says
analyst
Gene
Munster:
“They like
talking
about
[policing
content]
because
that ’s
what ’s(^) fixable.”