I would have thought they would have the best filtering AI and dataset the world has to offer, to avoid having those moderators to work like this.
Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
161–170 of 620 posts
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Ah right, last news I remember from a few years ago was that facebook had a child-company in Thailand that was hiring 1000s of moderators locally.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't know! It's conjecture in the first place. I assume _some_ ML is used - presumably (hopefully!) not all stuff that goes to moderators is because of a human flag, some of it is an ML model.
I can imagine, though, that there may be odd asymmetries that would encourage dumping the problem on to a contractor work force.
- The contractor work force is a fixed cost. Even if it seems high (the article quotes $100,000,000/year), this is (a) a known number you can budget around and (b) perhaps cheaper than spinning up a multi-disciplinary team to adapt ML models to solve the problem.
- The detection-for-copyright case may have more people co-operating. Rightsholders have a strong economic incentive to directly work with you to provide you with fingerprints of their copyrighted material that you can use to train a model. Trolls and bad actors aren't going to give you such a heads up, so you'll still need a contractor work force for the foreseeable future.
- This stuff is toxic. You can't underline that enough. Kiddie porn, gore, animal cruelty, conspiracy theories. Outsourcing it serves at least two purposes: you can blame the contractors for any problems and you keep it far from your core employees who are expensive to hire, train and retain, who may start to ask tough questions about the unwitting-if-not-unpredictable role Facebook plays in distributing this content to people.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#164It’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.”
Personally, I skimmed the article and failed to see anything particularly bad about it. Typical unskilled office job, with handpicked horror stories.
As usual, the author manages to make the employer responsible for employee's life situation. But aside from an impulse of assigning blame on the closest most powerful actor related to situation, I don't see any reason to see Facebook in any kind of negative light for this. They need a service performed, they found people who're willing to do that service for the money offered, they gave them this money. They didn't create neither the job situation, neither the lack of education, neither the whole life of choices that lead these people toward this point: they aren't even in a any condition to control the labor market.
And speaking of labor market, I really don't think that they would do anyone a favor if they pay significantly higher than the market going rate. In my experience, such an experiment creates a very unhealthy office politics: people realize that they won't get this kind of compensation anywhere else, and their concern for not getting fired becomes more influential than personal ethics or professionalism.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#165Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content. Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it. Can't kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we'll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn't exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes. Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective,…
Yup; bear in mind that pretty much ALL major user-generated content websites have to deal with this - think Google (and I now wonder if G+, Picasa, etc were shut down because they couldn't handle the inappropriate content anymore?), Dropbox (who may do a passive one where they only investigate if reported by law enforcement), Youtube (also Google), Discord, Slack, etc. It's a problem everywhere.
I also believe this is one of the reasons where Facebook's real name policy comes in - it discourages people from posting the worst of it. Animal brutality could just be kids fooling around on their phone, accidental, but produced child pornography is not, and the people making that shit know really well how they shouldn't put it on sites that require them to use their real names.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the devs would leave
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.
anyone thats been lurking/posting on chans for a long time also know neurotypicals couldnt deal with the content
just because some people become desensitized doesnt mean the obscene content wont damage the mental health of the entire set of people
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#167Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....
Make the executives do this.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#168Earlier 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?
It is because it is a waste of their time and a bad approach and everyone knows it fundamentally on some level - however nice the eglatarian ideal would be in other ways.
It would be like expecting doctors to clean bedpans. Now it is a neccessary task and those who do so should receive appropriate respect even if it is just "Thanks glad I don't have to do it." but anyone off the street and willing to do the dirty job could do it without a doctor's training which they spent over half a decade on to be /entry level/. Plus incredibly inefficient for effectively paying say $100/hr to a janitor when they could be saving lives instead.
Now asking them to do it in a neccessary and justifiable situation (say posting in an aid camp cut off by weather or in space thus making sending any extra bodies expensive) is one thing and they would be in the wrong then for refusing out of pride.
Absent that neccessity it shows poor sense of their actual value until medical degrees and skills become just as common as the skills to clean bedpans.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#169> 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…
Yeah, I mean Facebook can open up a portal for all local and national police precincts and law enforcement that goes "This is the content that our systems and content moderators marked as illegal, this is the exact location, date, time it was recorded, our facial recognition software identified these and these individuals", etc.
However, I just also described how Facebook could easily be used in a dystopian police state fashion. I am fairly sure they aren't allowed to proactively report crimes. And that law enforcement would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reports coming in all at once.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#170This 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…
I don't understand how this isn't a problem perfectly solved by the market. If it's a shit job that isn't worth the pay, people won't do it. If it's an okay job that isn't really worth the pay, they will have high turnover. High turnover has a cost, maybe it's worth it to them. If the turnover is so high or the job is so undesirable, maybe they'll axe the role. If the role is so important to the business that it can't be axed, but people aren't taking the jobs, they'll have to pay more for it. If they can't pay more for it because it cuts too much into profitability, but it's necessary for the company to operate, then they are no longer a viable company in the market. Or they'll have to innovate or adapt. All possibilities are fully encapsulated in very simple dynamics.