The French love LinkedIn, the Spanish are addicted to AliExpress, reports on Facebook are rarely successful and content moderation is largely automated: here are some lessons from the “transparency reports” that the 19 largest platforms have just published about European news rules to respect .
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AliExpress vs Amazon
A quarter of Europeans (104 million) use AliExpress, the sales site of the Chinese Alibaba. Especially in Spain (20 million) and Portugal (4 million), i.e. 40% of the inhabitants of the two countries on the Iberian Peninsula. The French are also being seduced, 18.7 million of them, far ahead of the 10.9 million Germans.
The latter prefer the American online sales giant Amazon, which accounts for three quarters of the population with 60.4 million German active users, compared to “only” 34 million French and 38 million Italians. Only Booking does not provide any information about its user numbers.
On the networking side, half of Europeans (258 million) use Facebook and almost as many (257 million) use Instagram. The French are particularly attached to LinkedIn, with 21 million users and, above all, 9 million accounts, by far the highest in Europe, where the professional platform has 132 million users and 45 million accounts.
AI moderation and self-censorship
All platforms and social networks report that they extensively use algorithms and language models to detect and remove illegal content (hate, fraud, fraud, violence, fakery, nudity, etc.). Millions of products are being withdrawn from circulation on sales platforms.
For example, in recent months, AliExpress has removed 9 million products from sale due to counterfeits, defects or fraud, 96% of which were detected automatically and with 95% reliability, the group said.
Amazon says it scans 8 billion attempts to change product sheets every day and has taken 274 million actions to remove content that violates its rules, of which 73 million actions were taken automatically.
- Listen to the interview with Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux, who is asking the media for financial support to respond to Meta’s news blocking QUB radio :
Facebook voluntarily removed 46 million pieces of content between April and September 2023, 95% of it automatically. Bing explains that it uses automatic image comparison to remove illegal videos. The App Store has made 1 million decisions, including 220,000 fully automated ones, such as deleting abusive reviews and closing accounts.
Human moderators are becoming increasingly rare. X (formerly Twitter) claims 2,294 in English, 81 in German, 52 in French, 12 in Arabic and 2 in Italian. TikTok claims to employ 6,125 people to moderate content in the EU alone. Meta only shows 1,362 moderators in European languages, but others are outside the EU and 2,000 work on images, with no set language. LinkedIn has 820 moderators, including 180 in the EU and 30 in France.
The big exception remains Wikipedia, with its tens of thousands of human moderators who make most of the contributions and corrections, including 5,000 in France.
Reporting is often pointless
The reports from Internet users are processed manually at Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.): Between April and September 2023, these were primarily intellectual property violations (370,000 reports), defamation (70,000) and invasions of privacy.
However, content was only removed for intellectual property violations in one out of three cases, defamation claims in one out of seven cases, and privacy violations in one out of five cases. Note that 575,000 pieces of content were restored following an “appeal process” against the decision.
In addition, metasites received 666 injunctions from authorities to release information about their users (for fraud, cyber-harassment, terrorism, child abuse, hateful content, etc.), to which they responded on average within 9 days.