Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#191

Post by spamizbad » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #129

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…

It also sounds like they are sold on the empty promise that these jobs will get your foot through the door into the lucrative technology industry.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#192

Post by jfindley » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

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…

Given the description of the videos in the article, I'm not sure that merely paying the moderators more would solve it.

I think for most people that I'd want to be moderating content (e.g. not sociopaths) making them richer isn't going to do anything to deal with the real reason this is worse than a call centre - the content itself. I'd rather see facebook put more effort into protecting moderators from the content they're viewing. I realise this is a non-trivial problem, but here's a few ideas of things they could do which may help:

* Once a video is confirmed bad, fingerprint it and block future uploads.

* Provide colour-inversion buttons to help reduce visual impact

* Rotate people between areas, so they aren't looking at the same class of bad content constantly

* Use ML training to detect which content is likely to be the most severe and for this content, reduce minimum viewing interval to ~ 5 seconds, and ensure that a single individual doesn't get too many of these.

* Flag accounts who post bad content too often, and shadow-ban them so their posts are not visible by anyone else (this could go in stages, starting off by blocking re-shares of their posts or something)

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#193

Post by skyyler » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #123

jerkstate wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a lot more to that website than /b/. The janitors on /out/ do a very good job of keeping the board clean.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#194

Post by Lewton » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #170

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…

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 is not how the labor market works... At all.

"Worth the pay" is overridden by "absolutely need this money for me or my kids to survive"

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#195

Post by xnyan » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #170

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…

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'…

"And the Union workhouses." demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?" "Both very busy, sir..." "Those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

C. Dickens: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, 1843

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#196

Post by skyyler » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #185

sandworm101 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 als…

Nobody moves for $30k a year.

Are you serious? I know people that have moved for less. Making absolute statements like that doesn't do much for anyone.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#197

Post by cloakandswagger » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #176

cloakandswagger wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 utili…

The cheapest route to moderation is automation, and I would be stunned if there isn't a thick layer of it applied before this content reaches human moderators.

My point is that ML is not a magic wand and we're still in its early days. Facebook would love to have a model that accurately identifies offensive content, but that level of AI does not exist today, and no amount of money thrown at it will instantly advance the state of the art to that point.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#198

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #174

organsnyder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> everything else you mentioned seems pretty bad, but what is so terrible about this?

Because PTO (or even pure sick leave) has less restrictive usage conditions than FMLA, it means that anyone who uses needs FMLA for a longer-term issue like a new child will also exhaust all the leave they have available for short-term personal or family illness or need for stress relief and be unable to use that until they have reaccrued it.

This is a legal but extremely employee-hostile policy that contributes to bad working conditions for everyone (not just the employees that need FMLA.)

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#199

Post by close04 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #141

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…

> they’re financially incentivized to undermine their rights

In the end most failings can be traced back to financial interest (getting cheap, staying cheap, aiming for cheaper). But the whole article was about how Cognizant and Facebook fail those poor souls who have to go through a "peaceful war", with all the gruesome tragedies but none of the preparation.

The state doesn't seem to try harder either. This particular detail related to sick leave was surprising to me, I hadn't expected this.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#200

Post by unethical_ban » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

DannyB2 wrote: post #107

> 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 don't think that was debated by OP.