How HuffPo keeps the trolls at bay

Human eyes ... and 'Julia'

Huffington Post recently boasted of hosting its 100 millionth comment, and, founder Arianna Huffington tells Mashable, there is a reason why the site's discourse is so active:

"From the first day when we had hardly any resources to spend on it, we committed ourselves to moderating comments," Huffington says.

HuffPo employs 30 human moderators who work alongside "Julia," a backend moderator that algorithmically filters out comments that don't belong on the site. They keep trolls and offensive remarks out of the comment sections and work to quickly approve posts so that there isn't a long gap between submitting a comment and it appearing on the site.

HuffPo says it averages 175,000 comments per day.

Which means "Julia" must be a workaholic, because 175,000 comments per day divvied up between 30 moderators would give each one responsibility for almost 6,000 apiece.

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