Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#81

Post by emiliobumachar » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #46

rorykoehler wrote: post #20

Earlier 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?

Executives would also not put up with it - obviously, to the point that I'm not sure whether you meant to include them or not when you said "employees".

Not wanting drudge work is common to nearly all people who have options. Why should devs get all the hate?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#82

Post by comboy » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

dillonmckay wrote: post #75

comboy wrote: post #25

> But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue (..) They kept reposting it again and again and again. Seems like it should be pretty "easy" to spot similar videos and audio (even after some modifications) given how great dataset all those moderators are providing. I'm pretty sure there are some pretty smart folks working at fb, so it would mean that given accuracy standards it's still cheape…

No, that is only to protect IP rights.

I don't understand, can you elaborate? What difference does it make if a duplicate is spotted by a human vs by a machine?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#83

Post by anon029102 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

cldellow wrote: post #12

This 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…

> Can anyone at Facebook speak to whether engineers are aware of the working conditions of moderators, and agitate to improve their lot?

They are passively aware but mostly don't care. The engineers who express frustration are in the vast minority. Most engineers are just super happy about their own situations, very focused on PSCs, and try to keep to their own stuff. Any internal frustrations are channelled towards appropriate feedback channels where the anger is watered down.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#84

Post by save_ferris » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

holidaygoose wrote: post #62

save_ferris wrote: post #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.”

It seems like content moderation is just a crazy wicked problem. And the company is doing the best it can with a lot of constraints. Better communication with the workers sounds like it would help, but what else should they be doing realistically?

Paying them better and taking their working conditions more seriously.

There are serious scalability issues with facebook’s current business model, which inevitably puts workers in a position where they have few rights, low pay, and poor working conditions.

We have to be able to question the viability of a business that treats workers this way. Contracting firms essentially allow companies like FB to completely absolve responsibility for the conditions of these low-paid workers.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#85

Post by dillonmckay » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

apanloco wrote: post #45

800 workers, 1 bathroom. Really?

Sounds like my current HQ.

I have worked for too many startups with inadequate bathroom setups.

It is a big red-flag for me now.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#86

Post by mpclark » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #73

“But had his managers asked, they would have learned that Speagle had a history of anxiety and depression“ Should employers really be asking about mental health history during the hiring process?

Of course, if the job involves risks to mental health!

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#87

Post by Lewton » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

holidaygoose wrote: post #62

save_ferris wrote: post #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.”

It seems like content moderation is just a crazy wicked problem. And the company is doing the best it can with a lot of constraints. Better communication with the workers sounds like it would help, but what else should they be doing realistically?

They're contracting it out so they can wash their hands, how's that count as "doing the best they can"?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#88

Post by akerro » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

arzeth wrote: post #38

I have a hotkey in i3wm: bindsym $mod+backslash exec "xcalib -i -a" which inverts all colors (btw, I have to `killall redshift` because of a bug). When colors are inverted, I feel almost undisturbed at any gruesome content (for me it's like seeing screenshots of Quake 2 with buggy GPU drivers), yet I can still easily recognise whether the content is disturbing. And when it's a video, I play it at ≥2x speed so that it…

They most likely can't change wallpaper on their windows XP...

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#89

Post by bilbo0s » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

phosphophyllite wrote: post #68

Maybe censoring is not effective? Why not to embrace any content and just make police raids when someone uploads questionable content? Is censorship solves anything?

Um...

police busting down your door for uploading a video kind of is censorship.

But yeah, I'm now starting to see why more and more people are just wanting to go to the censor and police raid system. A lot of this stuff people are uploading just doesn't belong in a civilized society. What started off as maybe just content on making non violent jokes about blacks or gays has morphed into showing children being disemboweled and videos of little old black or jewish ladies being gunned down in their place of worship. It's just gone too far.

Probably just have to file it under:

"This is why we can't have nice things"

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#90

Post by chefandy » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

creaghpatr wrote: post #61

danharaj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 narrativ…

Are you really trying to gaslight me here? Why not address my argument instead?

You're telling workers that it's their fault being abused by a crappy employer when there are many reasons someone might not be able to leave a job, but are accusing someone who's pointing that out of gaslighting you. I think that, itself might actually be closer to gaslighting.