In 2010, Accenture signed an accounting contract with Facebook. By 2012, this was expanded to include a content moderation contract, particularly outside of the United States.
This year, Facebook sent employees to Manila and Warsaw to train Accenture employees to sort through posts, said two former Facebook employees involved in the trip. Accenture employees were taught to use a Facebook software system and the platform’s policies to leave content open, remove it, or escalate it for review.
‘Honey Badger’
What started out as a few dozen Accenture presenters grew quickly.
By 2015, Accenture’s San Francisco Bay Area office had set up a team codenamed Honey Badger just for Facebook’s needs, former employees said. Accenture has grown from around 300 employees in 2015 to around 3,000 in 2016. Depending on the location and the task at hand, they are a mixture of full-time employees and contractors.
The company soon bundled its work with Facebook in moderation agreements with YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and others, executives said. (The digital content moderation industry is projected to hit $ 8.8 billion next year, according to Everest Group, roughly double the total by 2020.) Facebook also has Accenture contracts in areas like checking for fake or duplicate user accounts and monitoring Issued by celebrity and branded accounts to ensure they haven’t been inundated with abuse.
After federal agencies discovered in 2016 that Russian activists had used Facebook to distribute divisive posts to American voters for the presidential election, the company increased the number of moderators. It said it would hire more than 3,000 people – in addition to the 4,500 it already had – to oversee the platform.
“If we want to build a safe community, we have to react quickly,” Zuckerberg said in a 2017 post.
The next year, Facebook hired Arun Chandra, a former executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as vice president of Scaled Operations to oversee its relationship with Accenture and others. Ms. Sandberg oversees his department.