depends on your definition of 'automate'. If you mean by computer software, perhaps not, but it begs the question of why one would presume that automation to be necessary. If you just mean 'software' (not necessarily computer software), then yes, rule of law is software that has scaled to manage society scale interactions and run for hundreds of years. Whether it is 'fair' is still debatable, but it is at least more legitimate than FB's system.

I don't believe that you can manually moderate platforms at this scale. Even with the hybrid model of some manual moderation, I've read a lot of articles on the content they're forced to deal with crushing their mental health.

Add to that politics intervening threatening regulation unless they're allowed to tilt the scales. I can't even imagine how endlessly complicated that gets.

I've been debating this question internally for a while and also the question of algorithms. Subjectively speaking it seems to me that it's just as herculean of a task to come up with an algorithm that provides quality content to just about any user. I've tried some of these "alt-tech" sites/servies that claim to have no feed algos other than popularity and even the ones that have a few quality channels on them have their front pages flooded with all sorts of cooky, weird, bad material.

This is not a defense of Facebook (or Twitter), just some thoughts I had for a while now.

Well, legislation + policing + prosecution + courts of law with due process are precisely that - manual moderation of social behaviour at massive scale (admittedly not billions, but hundreds of millions of individuals). Yes, endlessly complicated, yes, costs a fortune, yes, riddled with flaws, yes, it becomes a political problem, yes can be very emotionally challenging (I know because my wife is a criminal public defender. A bad day for me is when a sprint is late. A bad day for her is literal rape, torture, murder, injustice. Definitely puts things in perspective. But she knew what to expect, has a balanced workload, is well compensated and believes it is for a greater good. If facebook is structuring things in a way that people are being crushed - I've read those articles too and don't doubt it - shame on them). But 'it's hard work' isn't a very good excuse.

To be clear - I understand your point and sort of agree with it from a software engineering perspective; I just don't think that's necessarily the right perspective here. Every day we demand that governments and companies in all sorts of different industries do lots of hard, complicated, not-easily-computer-programmable, bug-riddled human processes requiring subjective judgement because they need to be done.

People & organisations aren't entitled to only do the things that need to be done which they can do with near-zero marginal cost with computer software - when they can do that, good for them. When they can't, tough.

Yes, I agree, from personal experience designing good Recommendation Systems is hard. That's a field I'm interested in too - out of curiosity what alt-tech sites have you tried? Would be interested in also trying them and exchanging notes.

I find it hard to disagree with any or that! Admittedly I was just thinking user experience, false positives and programming when I mulled it over in my head.

I tried Locals, Gab (in their less controversial, earlier life while they still had an app store app), Parler, Bitchute, Rumble, Minds, MeWe.

I generally found that the experience is the exact opposite of Big Tech where you often get lost in the information presented to you and very often it’s low quality or annoying unless you go there to specifically watch or read or see something.

Thanks! Will have a look at those