South Park did an episode on this. Where everyone was so afraid of "reality" they elected someone to censor it all and keep their tweets only positive. Butters had to see every depraved thing. And he ended up trying to kill himself. And in the end, when he almost died, they blamed him for failing to be the perfect filter.
The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#62I would expect that social media websites whose content is largely decided democratically (via votes, shares, or the like) would relegate the majority of this content to a place where it is not seen by many. I would argue that the best way to handle this issue is to let the sites mechanisms deal with the content accordingly and then focus efforts on developing processes that will be able to detect and remove it autom…
If you have voting and subreddits you’d just end up with a community that only upvotes what they think is the best child porn (ie: Reddit’s jailbait subreddits)
Right, but that content doesn't seem to escape that specific subreddit (Or if it does, it is quickly voted down to oblivion). So in the context of moderators having to view objectionable content all day it is either content they don't mind viewing, or neatly packaged so it can be banned entirely if it is illegal.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#63This sort of stuff at one point was handled by hosting providers. It now seems that the internet is "facebook/google" so it is no wonder they are getting the brunt of this sot of work. I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out. 8k post in a day is just too many for one person. Its not about how much work they are doing, its about th…
>I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out. The police normally rotate staff on and off the analyst post every few months. I was speaking to a detective, saying I was interested in going into digital forensics, and he just plainly said "no, you don't want to do that". He said he knew he'd spent too long on the job when he was walkin…
I still remember reading an interview years back with people working at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (I think; it was some time ago) whose job was to identify and track exploited children online. The part that's stuck with me was a remark about an infant whose photos kept popping up and didn't match any missing person reports. They gave the child a name at some point, and could only watch as this child literally grew up through child abuse images, year after year, because they didn't have anything to identify him by.
That interview was haunting. I can't imagine how hard it must be, or what kind of toll it takes on you, even if you're able to rotate through to something less stressful after a short period of time.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#64In the very early days of the internet being used at a very large corporation, I had the task of reviewing proxy logs to monitor what was euphemistically called "non-business use of the internet". I started by scanning for URLs with "XXX" in them, then pivoted to make a more extensive list.
I never looked at the content itself. Just the seeing the URLs was corrosive enough.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#65I found this juxtaposition unsettling: “I was watching the content of deranged psychos in the woods somewhere who don’t have a conscience for the texture or feel of human connection,” "...If the managers noticed a few minutes of inactivity, they would ping him on workplace messaging tool Slack to ask why he wasn’t working." The texture of human connection is severely diminished when you are managing what is essential…
Likewise this part... > Whisper no longer employs U.S.-based moderators. It uses a team in the Philippines along with machine-learning technology. Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. The underlying issue is seeing content moderation purely as cost that should be minimized. Taking YouTube Kids for example I'm sure you could sell parents products based around moderated…
> Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers.
Are you saying such workers are better off without these jobs?
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#66This sort of stuff at one point was handled by hosting providers. It now seems that the internet is "facebook/google" so it is no wonder they are getting the brunt of this sot of work. I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out. 8k post in a day is just too many for one person. Its not about how much work they are doing, its about th…
Any neural network can probably be gamed by people that really want to get around it.
That might be true. But remember we are talking about people posting in public places like Facebook. I can't imagine that being a smart move, so I am questioning their intelligence.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#67I found this juxtaposition unsettling: “I was watching the content of deranged psychos in the woods somewhere who don’t have a conscience for the texture or feel of human connection,” "...If the managers noticed a few minutes of inactivity, they would ping him on workplace messaging tool Slack to ask why he wasn’t working." The texture of human connection is severely diminished when you are managing what is essential…
Likewise this part... > Whisper no longer employs U.S.-based moderators. It uses a team in the Philippines along with machine-learning technology. Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. The underlying issue is seeing content moderation purely as cost that should be minimized. Taking YouTube Kids for example I'm sure you could sell parents products based around moderated…
> Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers.
Other big problem with this is the lack of cultural background for doing this.
Only if you belong to a given culture you can understand the subtleties and the cultural tolerance according to each culture.
This is one of the things that should make us think, about how bad is the situation of centralized social networks, when the values of one culture can be arbitrarily imposed into another.
People and cultures in general should have the right to organize according to their own cultural values. So the only right way to do this, at least if its a centrally managed network, is to have native people doing this for each country they have presence for.
If this is too expensive to do it in the beggining .. maybe hire not just cheaper labor, but from countries (cultures) that have good sensibility about foreign cultures, and select the people with talent to understand cultural nuances.
I feel particularlt outraged when according to a given foreign culture, one thing that locally is not a big deal, get censured, and then you think how close we are to the big brother (by the way theres a certain country already going through this path).
But in the western hemisphere, if nothing change, we are slowly consolidating a regime of digital feudalism were corporations are free to dictate rules for our lives.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#68A Kaggle competition just started a week ago, hosted by Jigsaw (part of Alphabet) for classifying toxic content (insults, threats, vulgarity, etc) in online comments. $35,000 prize pool.
https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification...
Also interesting, they already have an API for doing this sort of classification: https://perspectiveapi.com/
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Abuse departments make their respective platforms better places to be, largely because most people do not want to sift through a flood of angry pro-white propaganda and "jailbait". Just look at the horrendous quality of discourse on Voat. Or worse, 8chan.
So previously you all were talking about filtering child porn, but now you admit the desire to filter out political content you disagree with? That's, like, dramatic reversal.
Not all content. There is a considerable difference between disagreeing about the best policies to reduce healthcare costs and disagreeing about whether white people should violently expel nonwhites from society.
Re: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
#70[deleted]