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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

#101

Post by organsnyder »

awakeasleep wrote: post #58
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #27

" 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 hosp…

A local healthcare system has a similar policy: PTO (paid time off) is not differentiated between sick days vs. other days off. They don't offer any sort of maternity/paternity leave, aside from what the US Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires, which is six weeks unpaid time off. Even worse, they require employees to burn up all of their accrued PTO days before taking any unpaid FMLA time. So you have new parents returning to work sleep-deprived, picking up new viruses from the petri dish that is their kid's new daycare, with no time off. And most of these workers are HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS.

How stupid are we as a nation that we don't mandate more humane/non-stupid policies, even for people in environments where coming to work unhealthy can often result in death?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#102

Post by akerro »

comboy wrote: post #82
dillonmckay wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Machine learning for recognizing duplicates is only for "protection of IP rights", not for protection of low wage workers. Apparently somebody at facebook decided that ML is more expensive than low wage human worker rejecting the same material over and over. Layers are more expensive and bring more bad media coverage than someones suicide in 3rd world country.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#103

Post by ralphstodomingo »

I'm sure such scale requires heavy moderation. It pains me to realize the cost of enjoying the benefits of social media - if any, at all - that it makes me wonder whether we should have it in the first place at all.

I can imagine a world without Facebook.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#104

Post by isolli »

pawelmurias wrote: post #31
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…

It's knowledge workers vs unskilled labour.

No, it's market forces. If the world was overflowing with employment opportunities, then unskilled labor would leave unpleasant jobs, and employers would have to pay them as much as it takes for someone to put up with the unpleasantness.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#106

Post by zhte415 »

arethuza wrote: post #15

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

This makes complete sense. Why pigeon hole employees into, well, pigeon holes? Technology, Operations, Marketing, more. Each understanding more about each others' roles, challenges, solutions. A knowledge organisation is based on knowledge. I'd favour a scale that could be chosen, 5-50% outside of core role.

[Clarity: Am not a Facebook employee.]

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#107

Post by DannyB2 »

> there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook:

> engineers ($150k/year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and

> content moderators ($30k/year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses).

If Facebook could get away with paying engineers $30K/year, no benefits, believe me, they would.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#108

Post by bilbo0s »

anon029102 wrote: post #70
holidaygoose wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> what else should they be doing realistically? - Pay them better - Give them proper healthcare - Don't isolate/silo them These things would enable them to better deal with the inevitable stress and secondary PTSD that comes with their work. And would help FB perms to observe difficulties and quickly affect change.

Well, they should be elevated above the other departments to handle the obvious security and conflict of interest issues that naturally exist in any company like this. So their salaries should be much higher. And actually, more important than healthcare, which the employee takes advantage of at the employee's own discretion, there should be mandatory mental health counseling and screening. I don't know what the frequency should be, I'm not a clinician. But my layman's guess would be a minimum of 3 times a year for each employee.

But I disagree about siloing them. I mean, I'm sure there are some pretty good security reasons for siloing content moderation off from other parts of the company. Not saying that anyone from FB would necessarily do the following, but imagine an ad sales bonuses start going away because clicks are down. You just can't have ad sales cooperating with content moderation in any way shape or form to get more clickable content through. There should just be a content policy, and content moderation zaps whatever they please. End of story. That's how it should work. If ad sales wants input, they should have to convince legal to change the content policy.

In other words, if this thing were structured correctly, content moderation would be above most everything else. (Everything other than legal.) And completely untouchable via any mechanism other than an official change of the acceptable use and content policies.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#109

Post by overthemoon »

ralphstodomingo wrote: post #103

I'm sure such scale requires heavy moderation. It pains me to realize the cost of enjoying the benefits of social media - if any, at all - that it makes me wonder whether we should have it in the first place at all. I can imagine a world without Facebook.

This is what I keep coming back to. I don't think Facebook is worth it. I would personally extend this to most, if not all, social media.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#110

Post by mulmen »

lemcoe9 wrote: post #16
the_duke wrote: post #13

Couldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be detected in an automated fashion? Especially screams in the audio should be fairly easy to find. Then block those videos by default, with a manual appeals process that sends it to a moderator, combined with a big warning that submitting videos against the TOS will get you suspended. Of course this could lead to people submitting videos without audio, but this wil…

"should be fa[i]rly easy to find" Nope. It's just not that easy. Why do you think the biggest companies on the planet struggle so mightily to reliably and un-controversially figure out what content to block.

Because they optimize for profit. Moderation is a cost center.
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