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Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

theverge.com

131–140 of 620 posts

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#131
post #60

There 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-moderate…

Even with lower resolutions, fingerprinting (on a frame level) should still work relatively well, shouldn't it? If you get a certain level of confidence on each frame - if you have 80% of the frames with 80% confidence to be the same as $someVideo, that ought to be good enough overall to not get false positives but catch repeat views - how many 30s videos will randomly share 80% of their frames with a 90s video of an animal being abused?

I assume that most of these videos aren't manipulated by professionals to escape a ban by looking completely different (which actually would make it a different video), but that they are mirrored, cut, have extra material appended or, as you suggested, have their resolution changed. I'd guess that videos are easier to ID than, say, image data, because you have plenty of material to work with.

Are there well-organized troll armies attacking Facebook? Because trying to sneak a video in that shows an animal being abused and doing sophisticated changes to evade detection sounds weird on a platform where there isn't even (as far as I know) monetary gain connected to posting a video (as it might be on YT or for Email spam).

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#133
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…

It seems like moderating audio is also part of the job and equally disturbing as the video.

Not sure how you get around that.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#134
This story reads like a journalist trying to find some dirt on Facebook because its “hot” right now. Its the inverse of writing fluff stories when everyones excited about a startup. This story isn't even Facebook.

I worked tech support for Acer in the 90s and its a similar setup. If they took the time to have “relaxation” rooms, i doubt its as bad as the story makes it out to be.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#135
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…

That part of the article says they allowed the video of animal abuse to remain visible so that law enforcement could do something about it. Of course, that's bullshit for many reasons.

Ban the user and the video, if the same video is posted again, autoban it. If the user is law-enforcent, allow them to see the details of all related content that was banned.

There are neat things called if-statemets that could do that.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#136
So ... we all need to start flagging beautiful nature scenes, humorous comics, lists of health tips, and job postings for less stressful jobs that you could do if you're already qualified for being a facebook moderator?

At least that way they get a bit of a break from all the other horrible stuff.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#137
post #134

This story reads like a journalist trying to find some dirt on Facebook because its “hot” right now. Its the inverse of writing fluff stories when everyones excited about a startup. This story isn't even Facebook. I worked tech support for Acer in the 90s and its a similar setup. If they took the time to have “relaxation” rooms, i doubt its as bad as the story makes it out to be.

You obviously didn't read the article.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#138
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 site…

Only if they dole out libra-bux

>libra-bux

Personally I'm fond of zucc-bux

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#139
post #102
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?

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.

>3rd world country

These workers are in the U.S. FYI

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#140
>> "Speagle vividly recalls the first video he saw in his new assignment. Two teenagers spot an iguana on the ground, and one picks it up by the tail. A third teenager films what happens next: the teen holding the iguana begins smashing it onto the street. “They beat the living shit out of this thing,” Speagle told me, as tears welled up in his eyes. “The iguana was screaming and crying. And they didn’t stop until the thing was a bloody pulp.”

>>"Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook. A manager told him that by leaving the video online, authorities would be able to catch the perpetrators."

Utterly disgusting and inhumane policy on facebook's part.

Continuing to display abject animal cruelty only lowers the bar for would-be imitators.

There have also been shown to be strong links between animal cruelty and human cruelty, including murder.

To be clear, the ONLY proper way to handle this is to immediately take it down and file a report with the relevant police agencies. Expecting the local police agencies to maintain the same staff of 30,000 people to monitor FB posts for crime is stupidly absurd.

This is at best depraved indifference on FB's part, and more likely a deliberate dishonest rationalization to keep posted something extreme that will get lots of 'views' and 'engagement'.

This is only one of millions of examples, including cooperating with the Russian / Cambridge Analytica / etc groups to corrupt elections in the US, England, and elsewhere.

Simply put, Facebook is deliberately poisoning society for profit, and far worse than any tobacco company ever did.

They need to be shut down. Now. There are far better ways to do everything FB claims to do.

(edit: add police report paragraph)

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