The Art Of Selective Transparency

Facebook has always remained secretive about the numbers employed to moderate content its even more ironic, when all these organisations now are seeking for a institutionalisation (whatever that means) of the agreement

- Amantha Perera

This indeed is an art. An art perfected for public consumption, fibbing and managing the financial bottom-line.

A lot has been written about social media and last month’s elections. Last week, a lot of praise was freely uncritically dispensed on some of those, who worked on moderating election-related fakes and misinformation campaigns. Ironically, there was so much praise going around it was hard to figure out why we had been talking so much and so long about this.

The occasion was Hashtag Generation’s unveiling of its report on election-related content moderation. Representatives from Hashtag Generation, Election Commissioner Mahinda Deshapriya, Facebook country contact points and representatives from other organisations that worked on moderating and reporting on misinformation, spoke at the event. Each praised the other more often than not. They seem to be quite satisfied with a job well done.

Now the problem with Facebook is that it is not a fan of transparency. Say on the thorny issue of content moderators. Facebook has always remained secretive about the numbers employed to moderate content, especially numbers on languages like Sinhala.