Well, by “appropriate” I more meant “we think this is okay for someone to post on our platform” and not “our inscrutable algorithm / someone’s ad buy thinks you’ll engage with this”. They definitely do a lot of the latter, but not a whole lot of the former (with the possible exception of their laser-focused crackdown on breastfeeding photos and trans people’s usernames). They just haven’t seemed terribly concerned with policing content for accuracy or acceptability based on regional mores (or even laws, as has been the case with their Fair Housing Act-violating ad platform). I think it’s because Silicon Valley techbros are free speech absolutists with no actual understanding of how human communities operate in the real world and a persistent belief that online spaces are somehow magically different than meatspace ones. Even if they did suddenly obtain a grasp of actual human social behavior, though, I think any serious attempt to implement such a rigorous moderation policy would ultimately collapse under the manpower requirements, because algorithmic and crowd-sourced solutions are far to easily gamed by bad actors.
A single, central, global platform is simply too large to moderate. It’s also demonstrably incapable of meeting its social obligation to ensure that everything happening on that platform is in good faith (e.g. no trolls, no impersonation, no covert influence campaigns targeting foreign elections…), and that its users aren’t discriminated against (e.g. systems auto-flagging LBGTQ+ content as “adult”). Such a platform also tears down the barriers separating legitimate sources of news and information from random quacks and cranks until everything is just one big morass of data (this is sort of an Internet-at-large problem too, but Facebook makes it so much easier to fake legitimacy). Facebook basically looks at this problem, says “eh, what can you do?”, and soldiers on anyway under the assumption that the problem will work itself out in the end if they just keep throwing neural networks at it. I look at it and say “Facebook needs to go away”.
The same goes for platforms like Twitter and YouTube, really. They’re all the apocryphal good men doing nothing.
