Inside Facebook’s moderation hub in Athens

For months, Tassos was banned from speaking about his job in the southern Athens suburb of Moschato. His task was determining whether content put up on Facebook should be allowed to stay there. In the few seconds until the next post would pop up on his screen, he would feel his chest tightening. If he had the slightest doubt about his judgment, he had to consult an online rulebook indicating the crudest violations of community standards. There, he would encounter imagery of hard-core porn and animal torture. "I can still recall a picture depicting two little dogs that were hung from their front feet," Tassos told Kathimerini. But the line between inappropriate content and censorship was not always clear to him. "The guidelines set by Facebook were nebulous and the phrasing was sloppy. We often did not know whether we were making the right call," he said.

Tassos was one of...

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