I can't wait until my bank has to pay teams of people to keep child porn and beheadings off its website!
Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
171–180 of 620 posts
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#172I 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…
Maybe they think that flagging shit online is easy and pays well to later find themselves with anxiety in the house. This kind of stuff is never easy to pin point
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#173Maybe 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 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…
> Make the users do a little every so often.
Oh, dear god, no - have you ever used Reddit? This is what happens when you outsource moderation to the sorts of users who enjoy moderating other people.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#174Earlier 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…
> Even worse, they require employees to burn up all of their accrued PTO days before taking any unpaid FMLA time.
everything else you mentioned seems pretty bad, but what is so terrible about this? unless you are trying to keep your PTO buffer high so you can cash out on a higher salary when you leave, it doesn't seem to make much difference if you were going to need to take the unpaid leave anyway.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#175The issue is not as much Cognizant or FB as it is the state of the public. The horrible acts posted online for entertainment by the public is the reason for companies like Cognizant. I hope these posts can forwarded to local law enforcement and the posts used as evidence against the poster.
As evidence of what?
Crime. Several of the examples are clearly cruelty to animals. If a cop watched them do it, they would be arrested on the spot.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
I'm not suggesting that moderation is easy to automate. I'm saying Facebook is an advertising company that cares about content moderation exactly as far as it impacts their advertising business and no more.
They have no concern for the moderators or the content, they just want to solve this problem (as it relates to profit) as cheaply as possible. At this point in time they believe the best way to do this is by utilizing low-cost labor.
Facebook could easily devote more resources to caring for these moderators but they don't because doing so has no further positive impact on the bottom line.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#177> 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.
I'm sorry but who wouldn't? I would.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, I should perhaps clarify - I mentioned developers to point out that Facebook has the resources to provide excellent working conditions.
If I can adapt (and perhaps torture) your analogy, I'd say it's like Facebook currently has doctors who save lives and command high salaries, and janitors who change bedpans but don't have access to hot water and latex gloves. So inevitably, the janitors catch a disease (hospitals are filthy, after all! This is foreseeable!) and are no longer able to work, at which point they are replaced.
Given that the hospital can afford to pay the doctors, we might ask if they could splash out for latex gloves and soap for the janitors, too.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#179I 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…
Maybe they think that flagging shit online is easy and pays well to later find themselves with anxiety in the house. This kind of stuff is never easy to pin point
Maybe when they apply. But from the sound of things that idea would vanish in the first week.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#180This 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'…
>> If it's a shit job that isn't worth the pay, people won't do it.
That assumes perfect knowledge. As mentioned in the article, these moderators often do not understand what they are getting into until long after they have committed to the job. Once you have quit a previous job, moved, setup your new life, only then do you realize your new "brand consultant" job means watching kittens die all day.
Jobs like this also open persons to realities that we normal keep tucked away deep in our brains. We all know that cops don't investigate most reported crimes, but that doesn't come up very often for us. A facebook moderator sees the crimes, sees the lack of response by the police or anyone else, every minute. Repeatedly, every minute. Nobody can appreciate what this does to ones' mental state until you have been there.