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Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

theverge.com

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Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#121

Post by Miner49er »

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…

Facebook won't do anything to help these moderaters unless the cost of the negative PR exceeds the cost of doing something. Engineers at FB could help achieve this by causing agitation, for sure.

Maybe the best solution is for the moderaters to unionize.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#122

Post by Shivetya »

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…

anyone who has done moderation for any active forum can tell you how nightmarish it can be. the more popular the platform the more problems you can have.

anecdotal, friend who streams on twitch also mods for a few streamers and they even have issues when a stream is in subscriber mode only. simply because anonymity and distance from those being affected empower people to do bad things

edit : I am really surprised there is/are not companies which would spring up to provide these services seeing how most of these activities are required by law.

however before bemoaning what they are paid, just go look at your local 911 operators who are government employees. just because we think it should be paid more doesn't mean others do.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#123

Post by egypturnash »

jerkstate wrote: post #116
eswat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was just thinking that. 4chan janitors are volunteers. Of course, the payoff is helping 4chan exist, not helping Facebook make a few billion more, so the incentive is still vastly different. Still, that might be the right recruitment pool.

I don’t think so. They’d just beat off to the orphan vivisection videos all day long.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#124

Post by cloakandswagger »

mulmen wrote: post #110
lemcoe9 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Right, so wouldn't they be highly motivated to create models for detecting it automatically? Even if it cost millions of dollars to develop, they would both save money on human labor and boost PR by avoiding articles like this haranguing them about "torturous" working conditions.

The fact is that the state of the art for ML is simply not to the point where you could build a model for reliably identifying a category as broad and ambiguous as "violence".

I would hope HN users, even if they aren't directly familiar with ML, would appreciate that it isn't trivial.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#125

Post by komali2 »

organsnyder wrote: post #101
awakeasleep wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

This is one of the rare times I believe malice trumps stupidity. Our healthcare industry generates billions and some of that money is being spent lobbying to keep things just as they are.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#127

Post by thecatspaw »

cldellow wrote: post #96
comboy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If Facebook repeatedly permits copyright infringement on the same video, they might get sued by the rightsholder, which might be a very wealthy company with experience enforcing its rights in courts. In they repeatedly make a $30,000/year employee view 15 seconds of the same child being beaten to a pulp (...the minimum time they are obligated to watch each clip before rendering a judgment), the employee will just qui…

Wouldnt it be more economically viable to use it also for moderation? What is the point of making an employee watch the same video again, when they could instead moderate another video?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#128

Post by workingpatrick »

mcbits wrote: post #71
creaghpatr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your argument being ... that they should simply get a new job if it's so bad, or that the article must be misrepresenting the job if they don't?

I agree, we can't blame people with limited economic opportunities for taking a relatively 'good paying' job. We can absolutely blame one of the largest corporations in the country for offering jobs with such demanding and damaging work while offering few support services and allowing these sub-contacting companies to treat employees in such a manner.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#129

Post by _bxg1 »

I think the most pertinent question is why don't they quit?

It says a great deal about how broken the United States' job market and social safety net are. If minimum wage were $15, they could find another job that paid their basic living expenses. If health care weren't left up to your employer, they wouldn't be out of luck while looking for a different job. If there were any alternative, they wouldn't stay in this hellscape.

They stay because this is the best deal they could find. Think about the kind of society that makes that the case.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#130

Post by behringer »

hirundo wrote: post #67

> Nobody’s prepared to see a little girl have her organs taken out while she’s still alive and screaming. On the one hand, of course you don't want to see this and of course you want it removed from your social media feed. On the other hand, if it's hidden, it horrifies fewer people, and instead of rising social pressure to take action against it, it can fester in the dark. So if we manage to replace a significant ch…

Not in a million years would most people put up with it. If I ever saw something like that on FB I'd immediately delete my account.
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