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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

#141

Post by save_ferris »

close04 wrote: post #98

> Florida law does not require employers to offer sick leave, and so Cognizant workers who feel ill must instead use personal leave time. It seems that Facebook and Cognizant are not the only ones completely failing at protecting their people (employees, contractors, citizens).

Lobbying plays a huge role in how legislative decisions like this are made.

The city of Austin recently passed a mandatory sick leave policy, only to be struck down at the state level after lobbying by employers.

It’s not that companies like Facebook simply fail to protect their people, they’re financially incentivized to undermine their rights. And since money == free speech in the US, it’s perfectly legal for them to do so.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#142

Post by baud147258 »

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.

There are enough rules that I'd say it still qualify as knowledge work (not as much as developer, but still some level of knowledge):

-Public (https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards) and private guidelines

- A "Known Question" document (15k words)

- Facebook internal Workplace, with real-time (and sometime contradictory) decisions, for breaking news events

from https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#144

Post by jdietrich »

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…

It's a whole bunch more complicated than that - I'd highly recommend the Radiolab episode Post No Evil and the documentary The Cleaners for the full story.

Facebook doesn't have a blanket policy of removing violent content, for wholly legitimate reasons. Many users in Mexico very strongly want videos of cartel murders to stay on the site, because they feel that they are important reportage of something that the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to report. Many users in Syria very strongly want videos of IS murders to remain on the site, because they want the world to see the suffering that IS has wrought on their country.

If Facebook just delete all violent content, they're robbing the victims of violence of their voice - it doesn't feel like Facebook are protecting users of their platform, it feels like Facebook are complicit in covering up the crimes of drug cartels and terrorists.

It's not enough to identify that a video is violent - they need to know context. Is this particular video in this particular context a cry for help or a celebration of evil? Will removing this video silence the propaganda of a murderer, or will it help to conceal their crimes? Does this video show the death of an unidentifiable person in an ungoverned warzone, or is it vital evidence that urgently needs to be forwarded to the relevant authorities? For now, only well-trained human beings are capable of making that call.

This sort of dilemma points to the fundamental impossibility of moderating Facebook to the satisfaction of everyone. Some users complain about pornography, so Facebook make a policy to take down the porn. Other users complain that these policies are sexist and protest outside Facebook's offices to free the nipple. Facebook end up with several pages of rules that allow their army of moderators to consistently distinguish between pornographic and empowering nipples, but nobody's really happy with the outcome.

Facebook are doing a really crappy job of looking after their moderators, but that issue is fixable if we apply enough pressure. There are many other problems with moderating Facebook that are far less tractable and have far wider consequences.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#145

Post by raxxorrax »

dexen wrote: post #33
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…

>Couldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be detected in an automated fashion? Even if it could (and parallel posters argue it cannot), there is a meta-problem: "Who is allowed to post violent content?". Violence is contextual, and also legality of posting it is contextual. Same goes for other objectionable materials (nudity, extreme ideologies etc.). Point in case, if all users were subject to the same cr…

Exactly the phenomenon we are seeing today. Random people are accused to forming a hate-mob while main-stream media happily paints a target on individuals. Most of them are even innocent and just have the wrong opinion.

I thought the US had finally come to peace with nudity, but that was extremely wrong for every side of the political spectrum as the latest developments clearly show.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#146

Post by marvin »

onion2k wrote: post #69
mschuster91 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be farely easy to detect in an automated fashion? No. Already filters fuck up way too much and restrict perfectly legal content.

Already filters fuck up way too much and restrict perfectly legal content. Would users actually have a problem with that though? People have the freedom to share whatever they want, but that freedom doesn't necessarily have to include sharing it on Facebook . Facebook could decide to tell their users "We're filtering out the bad stuff much more aggressively now and unfortunately that might block your content by mista…

Such moderation has caused a significant degree of political grumbling in the recent past. E.g. where Facebook has blocked women's nipples but not men's, and also photos containing nudity that are politically important. E.g. the photo of Vietnam refugees fleeing a napalm attack, as well as examples of art that are politically important or relevant in an ongoing discussion, +++.

The difference between bona fide political censorship and decency/legality/prevent-minors-from-seeing-supposedly-horrible-things/stuff-we-just-don't-like-and-assign-a-political-label censorship is very much a matter of judgement.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#147

Post by skybrian »

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.

It's not "unskilled" so much as (a) it can be learned on the job and (b) people don't see why they should pay more for top talent.

The second one is pretty important. Consider that sales, sports, and entertainment work similarly, where you can make a case that you should pay more to get the best and workers (or their agents) can use this to good effect.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#148

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

Re: salaries, don't forget that there's also salaries working on the content moderation problem - taking the huge datasets that the content moderators are reviewing and applying machine learning and content ID and I have no clue what else more to automatically filter out a lot of the content, ideally with such a high certainty rate that the moderators don't see it in the first place.

I want to believe the content moderators only end up seeing the 1% of content that is dubious, or brand new content (not published and hashed earlier). I don't understand in that regard why the one video mentioned in the article (about the iguana) wasn't marked as "ok" in the systems, or marked as "on hold for law enforcement" so the moderators didn't have to see it again.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#149

Post by raxxorrax »

the_duke wrote: post #40
lallysingh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train with signals about the sender?

Also my first thought, but thinking it through, this can easily lead to (potentially valid) criticism of intrusive profiling and censorship.

And that would be bad because...?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#150

Post by sneak »

isolli wrote: post #104
pawelmurias wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

US unemployment rates are lower than they have been in more than a decade. There are more jobs than applicants.

It could be people prefer working at a desk and a screen in an air conditioned office to, say, schlepping boxes in a warehouse.

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