Web Summit: Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer reveals the amount of hate speech that Facebook's AI systems have identified and removed has increased five-fold

LISBON, Portugal, Dec. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

• Speaking at Web Summit: Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said that, in just a year – from the second quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of this year – the amount of hate speech that Facebook's AI systems have identified and removed has increased five-fold.
• Where the Facebook CTO sees Facebook – and the rest of the world – heading in terms of work culture is a place in which teams come together in person periodically to build relationships and make decisions. For more solo work, employees can be remote and in flexible setups.
• Speaking at 100,000-attendee online conference Web Summit, Schroepfer is part of a line-up that includes European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, tennis great Serena Williams and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Despite widespread skepticism about social media platforms and the spread of disinformation, Facebook's CTO said he still sees Facebook as a force for good that, at its core, does everything it can to help people around the world connect more easily and affordably.

"95, 98, 99 percent of that experience is people just connecting with their friends and family," Mike Schroepfer said. "Now, are there bad things that happen when you lower the friction for communication?  Absolutely, and that's what we've seen over the last many years, and why I've been so dedicated to allowing people to communicate freely but also eradicating hate speech, violence, [and] speech that just is not allowed on the site."

Schroepfer was interviewed by Jeremy Kahn, senior writer at Fortune Magazine, during the 100,000-attendee Web Summit.

In their 30-minute interview, Facebook's CTO went into great detail about the massive challenge, both from a technical and policy level, that comes with eliminating disinformation and hate speech on Facebook's enormous scale. But he also reiterated how important it is to the tech giant.

Kahn asked what message  Schroefper would have for critics who say that no amount of technology will fix this content moderation problem until Facebook is no longer optimised for attention, which he posits results in divisive content drowning out more positive, uniting content. To this, Schroepfer said all communication mediums throughout history, from newspapers to radio, have faced this dilemma, and that it's not new to social media giants like Facebook.

 "This is just a reality when humans connect. There are good uses and bad uses," he said. "The answer is not to clamp down on platforms and make them more restrictive. It's to decide as a democratic society what's allowed and not, and have platforms do our very best to enforce those rules."

Increasingly, AI is helping Facebook to root out problematic content, and it will be a massive part of the content moderation challenge. Schroefper said there's been "tremendous progress, but we're not done."

"So it's a frustrating place, where there's fair criticism leveled every day where we miss a piece of content. And that's why I get up every day – to eliminate that gap," he said.

In terms of hate speech – one of the hardest categories for machines to detect – AI systems  are now identifying 94.5 percent of it, according to Schroepfer. And, from the second quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of this year, the amount of hate speech that Facebook's AI systems have identified and removed has increased five-fold.

During the Web Summit interview, Schroepfer also said Facebook has come a long way in tracking deepfakes. 18 months ago, there was no deepfake detection process, but now most deepfakes are detected.

On the topic of remote work, Schroepfer said he is surprised how well it's worked for Facebook employees, with staff productivity staying high. But what he sees as deficient is the human connection of teams working in the same office. Virtual reality will help more down the line but, right now, 2D video "isn't cutting it."

"Technology is fundamentally a team sport. We have to work together to build things, make decisions and evaluate products," he said. "This video chat stuff is great; it's just not the same as being in a room with a set of people and making a hard decision about cancelling a project, or pivoting, or doing this feature over that feature. And that's what I really think we're missing."

Schroepfer advocated for a setup similar to his previous company, Mozilla, in which there was a distributed workforce and employees would meet in person for a week just once a quarter. He continued: "We wrote the least amount of code during that week, but you built a whole lot of relationships, made a bunch of decisions and everyone could go work from home and be super productive because they weren't distracted by meetings...I think that model of coming together to build relationships and make decisions, and disappearing to do productive solo work, is more where the world is going."

About Mike Schroepfer

Mike Schroepfer is the CTO of Facebook. He leads the development of the technology and teams that enable Facebook to connect billions of people around the world and make breakthroughs in fields such as AI and VR.

About Web Summit

In the words of Inc. Magazine, "Web Summit is the largest technology conference in the world". Forbes says Web Summit is "the best tech conference on the planet", Bloomberg calls it "Davos for geeks", Politico "the Olympics of tech", and the Guardian "Glastonbury for geeks".

Useful Links:
Web Summit website: https://websummit.com/
Web Summit Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/websummit/albums/
Web Summit YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJtkHqH4Qof97TSx7BzE5IQ