of them saidimagecreditjessica chou for the new york timesfacebook also began looking at outsourcing they said outsourcing was cheaper than hiring people and provided tax and regulatory benefits along with the flexibility to grow or shrink quickly in regions where the company did not have offices or language expertise ms sandberg helped champion the outsourcing idea they said and midlevel managers worked out the detailsby 2011 facebook was working with odesk a service that recruited freelancers to review content but in 2012 after the news site gawker reported that odesk workers in morocco and elsewhere were paid as little as 1 per hour for the work facebook began seeking another partnerfacebook landed on accenture formerly known as andersen consulting the firm had rebranded as accenture in 2001 after a break with the accounting firm arthur andersen and it wanted to gain traction in silicon valleyin 2010 accenture scored an accounting contract with facebook by 2012 that had expanded to include a deal for moderating content particularly outside the united statesthat year facebook sent employees to manila and warsaw to train accenture workers to sort through posts two former facebook employees involved with the trip said accentures workers were taught to use a facebook software system and the platforms guidelines for leaving content up taking it down or escalating it for reviewhoney badgerwhat started as a few dozen accenture moderators grew rapidlyby 2015 accentures office in the san francisco bay area had set up a team codenamed honey badger just for facebooks needs former employees said accenture went from providing about 300 workers in 2015 to about 3000 in 2016 they are a mix of fulltime employees and contractors depending on the location and taskthe firm soon parlayed its work with facebook into moderation contracts with youtube twitter pinterest and others executives said the digital content moderation industry is projected to reach 88 billion next year according to everest group roughly double the 2020 total facebook also gave accenture contracts in areas like checking for fake or duplicate user accounts and monitoring celebrity and brand accounts to ensure they were not flooded with abuseafter federal authorities discovered in 2016 that russian operatives had used facebook to spread divisive posts to american voters for the presidential election the company ramped up the number of moderators it said it would hire more than 3000 people on top of the 4500 it already had to police the platformif were going to build a safe community we need to respond quickly mr zuckerberg said in a 2017 postthe next year facebook hired arun chandra a former hewlett packard enterprise executive as vice president of scaled operations to help oversee the relationship with accenture and others his division is overseen by ms sandbergfacebook also spread the content work to other firms such as cognizant and taskus facebook now provides a third of taskuss business or 150 million a year according to regulatory filingsthe work was challenging while more than 90 percent of objectionable material that comes