The social networking giant Facebook has accelerated its reach to Indian IT services firms including HCL Technologies, Wipro and Tech Mahindra for the purpose of content moderation, anti-money laundering and data analytics as it faces increased global pressure and scrutiny to curb rumours as well as fraud on the platform.
The social network has increased the engagement in the “the last few months” with the Indian companies. One of the executives of a tech firm said the combined contracts of Indian companies with Facebook is valued at over $400 million and would only increase as the social network seeks human help in resolving issues that it had earlier thought would be helped by technology.
After the scandals broke out, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had promised to have over 20,000 people to improve security and content review on the platform.
In India, the government has already raised concerns with Facebook over the platform being used for spreading rumours. The social network has over 294 million users in India, its largest user base in the world as an October, according to data platform Satista.
The content moderators were to monitor and moderate user generated content/video on the social website to ensure that the online community is maintained as a safe and fun environment. In advertisements to recruit people, Genpact had also explicitly asked applicants that they should be comfortable for any content (of) “Sexual Assault, Terrorism, Child Abuse, may be live suicidal videos and blood”.
Zuckerberg on December 28 in a post on the platform said that the company has built artificial intelligence systems to automatically identify and remove 99% of the content related to terrorism, hate speech and more before anyone even sees it.