Mosseri acknowledges ‘mistakes’ in Threads and Instagram’s broken moderation

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri is acknowledging recent mistakes in Meta’s moderation processes on Threads and Instagram. For example, Meta unexpectedly deleted my account this week because it thought I was underage, the company locked my colleague’s account because she joked about dying in a heatwave, and others have seen their posts disappear with no clear reason why. “Threads Moderation Failures” has been trending this week — putting more pressure on Meta’s moderation processes.

Now Mosseri admits that Meta is having problems with those processes, and has publicly posted that acknowledgement on Threads. He explains there’s a “tool” that broke, which apparently did not show human reviewers “sufficient context” before they made posts and accounts disappear. You might think Meta is using AI to make decisions on what to delete and who to ban, but Mosseri’s suggesting that’s still done by humans, and that the algorithm is just flagging posts for possible enforcement actions.

Meta is already fixing some of the mistakes it found, according to Mosseri, helping reviewers make better calls in the future. “We need to do better,” Mosseri wrote.

Things already seem better for me personally: Meta quietly reinstated my account yesterday. But Meta didn’t answer our questions why users’ posts and accounts were being deleted. For me, the whole appeal process was grueling and mentally exhausting, as I explained in detail on Wednesday.