The issue is not as much Cognizant or FB as it is the state of the public. The horrible acts posted online for entertainment by the public is the reason for companies like Cognizant. I hope these posts can forwarded to local law enforcement and the posts used as evidence against the poster.
Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
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Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#52This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Fac…
It's knowledge workers vs unskilled labour.
It's also people not being paid nearly the value they produce for an organization. Everything is always a race to the bottom for us
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#53Just a warning - I found even a short description of some of the videos they had to watch fairly disturbing. I don't think I could do that job for very long - let alone in a badly run, high pressure environment with low wages.
I don't see how an average person could be expected to witness some of the things mentioned in the article. I didn't have time to read the entire article, but do they have counselors on staff or something?
That one paragraph about organs was enough to ruin my day, and it was just text. I'm surprised such a "rash of videos" wasn't in the news somewhere.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#54Maybe 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
Probably not the ones—if any—that lurk 4chan and other extreme imageboards, having been desensitized to such content or probably even get something off of it.
I actually wonder now how much of their workforce would fit in that demographic.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#55This is done for Youtube as well btw. Not a FB only problem.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#56For the wage mentioned in the article, I'm surprised they don't have trouble finding people to do the job. >Speagle helps to take care of his parents, who have health problems, and was afraid to quit Cognizant. “It was tough to find a job down here in this market,” he said. Tougher than watching graphic PTSD-inducing videos every day? It sounds like the job absolutely sucks but these contractors need to have a little…
> It sounds like the job absolutely sucks but these contractors need to have a little bit of personal responsibility for their own mental health. I suspect they do but the article gives the impression they are all trapped there with no way out.
> Tampa is a major call center hub so I imagine contractor positions are opening up all the time given general churn rates.
What matters is that you've come up with a narrative that convinces you it's the workers' fault.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No, its more like the devs have the necessary marketplace leverage and fallback to either put a quash on that notion or move on to another less ridiculous job. Don't think for a minute devs wouldn't be treated the same (and in some places ARE) if the corporate c-levels could get away with it without bleeding talent that is expensive to re-acquire. I am not, by any means, a Workers of the World Unite kinda person, but group negotiation and gasp unionization is becoming more and more necessary - if ONLY to get the beancounters to consider labor in their souless cost calculations when making decisions that lead to the conditions in the article.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#58" Conditions at the Phoenix site have not improved significantly since I visited. Last week, some employees were sent home after an infestation of bed bugs was discovered in the office — the second time bed bugs have been found there this year. Employees who contacted me worried that the infestation would spread to their own homes, and said managers told them Cognizant would not pay to clean their homes. " This is ut…
This is industry standard in businesses with limited sick day or leave policies. Especially in call center type environments.
Once an employee has used their allotment, they receive a write up if they take off again no matter how ill. Too many write ups and you're fired. Managers have no discretion in this process, so they can only mitigate the impact by doing something like bringing the trash can over or buying hospital masks.
Not saying it’s acceptable! But this isn’t a facebook problem specifically.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#59Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....
Make the users do a little every so often. Like Slashdot's "hey, go moderate some posts" thing but forced to before they can use the platform anymore. That'd be fun.
Of course the real answer is that this sort of site is a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Wide-open signup and public visibility of content, or ease of sharing it with strangers. Bad combo, don't care how much money it's making them (and other, similar sites).
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#60There seems to be a very distinct difference between employee classes. Management and high value tech employees are treated very well while moderators, gig workers etc are treated as "human resources", quite literally. It seems to me that they put companies like Cognizant between them and the exploited workers to deflect criticism as "we didn't know, we've been told by our partners that everything is great". And on a…
The only problems I see are that someone could potentially upload a lower resolution version of the video a moderator has seen and then perhaps bypass the content id system (I don't know how tolerant they tend to be for situations as that).
There's also the aspect of if we make it search out for distinct frames (like "scene change" type things), there's the possibility that some safe things could become auto-moderated which would be another controversy. Perhaps if they could locate start/stop times for inappropriate elements of the source video and then check for videos containing any of those in a later uploaded video, but then instead of asking human moderators to discern "is this video good or bad" we're now forcing them to get timestamps of when bad elements take place which would force them to really watch the video.
Dunno, I'm of the belief that it's just not an easily solved problem. I hope I'm wrong and they can toss money at the problem to fix it, but I genuinely don't know how they could.