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Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

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Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#41

There were many reasons that led to me deleting my Facebook account in May, 2018. The fact that the platform is a magnet for the absolute worst of humanity and then employs and exploits people in such an inhumane and cavalier way to filter the garbage out was high on the list. Get Zuckerberg to do the job for a few hours and see what he thinks.

I find that I haven't missed anything outside of people I haven't actually talked to in 10-20 years. Which, frankly, is easier. It's nice to let my social past stay in the past.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#42
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some NDA's can be too broad, but this is a bad take. It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets. This is what privacy regulations are all about. (At Facebook in particular, disclosing stuff about users is pretty bad, see lots of news stories over the last few years.) The balance between protecting privacy and making abuses public is pretty nuanc…

> It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets I disagree, it needs to be possible for whistle-blowers to operate freely. It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide. > This is what privacy regulations are all about I am pretty sure that this is a separate thin…

>It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide.

Whether or not a company really benefits from this in a particular case, the consequence of prohibiting any legal protections against the broad sharing of company information would be a lot more secrecy and compartmentalization of information.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#43
It’s strange how quiet the pro-Facebookers become on threads like these. Yesterday, we saw a lot of energy around Libra on both sides of the Facebook spectrum.

I’d love to hear an argument from someone defending this company that isn’t “everybody does it.”

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be farely easy to detect in an automated fashion? No. Already filters fuck up way too much and restrict perfectly legal content.

That's why I mentioned an appeals process for requesting human review. As long as this exists and actually leads to human review, I'd much rather wait a while for my videos to be posted if it means easing the burden on 15.000 people having to watch highly damaging content.

Why wouldn't the people who upload violent/pornographic content not always appeal their videos? It's not like they're accidentally posting banned content. This would lead to nothing more than a slight delay before it gets banned by a moderator, solving nothing.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#46

Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....

All the devs would leave

That's probably true - I wonder whether it would be because of the affront of having to do such menial tasks or the horror of realising that operating a global social network requires somebody to trawl through the filth and risk their mental health?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Couldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be detected in an automated fashion? Even if it could (and parallel posters argue it cannot), there is a meta-problem: "Who is allowed to post violent content?". Violence is contextual, and also legality of posting it is contextual. Same goes for other objectionable materials (nudity, extreme ideologies etc.). Point in case, if all users were subject to the same cr…

Train with signals about the sender?

That's my point: it would enforce an automated two-tier system. If you are "ingroup", you would be allowed to post virtually anything. If you are a regular citizen, good luck.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#48
Guy Rosen and other execs within Integrity team continually skirt their responsibilities here. They claim they're doing better, but the second-order effects of crappy work conditions and demands keep cropping up. Zuck says one day we will hopefully be able to AI-away this integrity work (especially the most traumatizing), but he does not say a whisper as to improving working conditions or pay while the work needs to be done by humans. And I bet Zuck wouldn't be able to handle the content that these people have to view. Sheryl does not care. She keeps referencing the same standard schpiel about how contracting companies have to abide by a strict set of standards, and how they're ahead of the market in terms of pay and wellbeing. But it's still awful. The divide between contractors and full-time workers at Facebook is truly disgusting.

People who work at Facebook should be pushing for change. But they're numb to the schpiel. They're cushy and looked after and don't want to create a fuss.

Rosen doesn't care. Zuck doesn't care. Sheryl doesn't care. What DO they care about? Perception. Sit in any high-up integrity meeting and you'll see the only thing they seem to talk about is how "x" would be received by users at scale. There's no comment as to the ethics or corporate responsibility. You can be talking about something pretty out there like how human rights intersect with takedown decisions and all you've got is a bunch of people umming-and-ahhing about lossy metrics and how Zuck wants this or that so we better hurry up. Or how awwesome it'll look on our PSCs if we ship this thing.

Broken company.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#49
post #19

I live in East Wall, Dublin -- beside the Facebook moderator (The Beckett) building. I wonder if this is true for them as well or if it's just N. America -- we've better employment protections and minimum wage in Ireland compared to the US.

AFAIK Content reviewers in the Dublin office work for Facebook as perm employees (are not contractors), and mostly deal with escalated cases from offsite contractors.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#50
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some NDA's can be too broad, but this is a bad take. It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets. This is what privacy regulations are all about. (At Facebook in particular, disclosing stuff about users is pretty bad, see lots of news stories over the last few years.) The balance between protecting privacy and making abuses public is pretty nuanc…

> It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets I disagree, it needs to be possible for whistle-blowers to operate freely. It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide. > This is what privacy regulations are all about I am pretty sure that this is a separate thin…

That's just wishing the problem away with techno-optimism. When you call someone at a company on the phone to get help, they often need to access your account. If they don't have access to anything, they're mostly useless and you get no help.

We're a long way away from making everything self-service and companies not needing to hire anyone to do support. Until all the support people get laid off, they need to be trusted at least to some extent. (Internal controls can be helpful.)

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