Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all facing moderation issues — here's how America's tech giants are struggling to police their massive platforms (AMZN, GOOGL, FB, TWTR)

Rebecca Aydin

August 24, 2019 2:32 PM

The Wall Street Journal published an investigation on Friday into Amazon 's "struggle to police its site." The report found that Amazon is allowing thousands of "banned, unsafe, or mislabeled" items to be sold on its marketplace.

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YouTube , Facebook , and Twitter similarly struggle to moderate content, illustrating the larger issue of tech platforms swelling to a size where current guidelines for oversight are no longer adequate.
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Amazon sells hundreds of millions of items on its online marketplace. With such a massive quantity of products, the question becomes: How does the company regulate what's being sold?

The Wall Street Journal published an investigation on Friday into Amazon's "struggle to police its site." The Journal found over 4,000 items being sold on Amazon that the publication says were labeled deceptively, determined to be unsafe by federal agencies, or banned by federal regulators. Those items included: a children's toy xylophone with four times the lead allowed by the federal government, knockoff magnetic children's toys that can lead to internal damage if ingested, and a motorcycle helmet that was falsely listed as US Department of Transportation-certified.