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Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

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Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#251

Post by autotune »

okr wrote: post #237
bumby wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we don't have those Ayn Rand-ian free markets for a reason. We have a whole host of workers rights in the U.S. because society realized that leaving everything up to free markets to take advantage of what they can may lead to bad outcomes.

Do you have an example for a free market, where this has happened? I consider the IT world, that i was part of, the most free experience in my life. No state was involved, contracts were enforced, people just got along. Plain level field. No one even thought of unionizing. Just now it peaks around the corner again. Rules, bureaucracy, everything that slows you down to make your own thing. Can i do this, can i do that…

>Rules, bureaucracy, everything that slows you down to make your own thing.

Would you say the same thing about OSHA? Sometimes having additional safeguards in place are a good thing.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#253

Post by bumby »

okr wrote: post #237
bumby wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we don't have those Ayn Rand-ian free markets for a reason. We have a whole host of workers rights in the U.S. because society realized that leaving everything up to free markets to take advantage of what they can may lead to bad outcomes.

Do you have an example for a free market, where this has happened? I consider the IT world, that i was part of, the most free experience in my life. No state was involved, contracts were enforced, people just got along. Plain level field. No one even thought of unionizing. Just now it peaks around the corner again. Rules, bureaucracy, everything that slows you down to make your own thing. Can i do this, can i do that…

Are you asking for examples where regulations came in without government intervention?

There's some examples from the labor movement in the U.S. that fit this sort of self-organizing regulation, although I don't know much on the subject.

Eventually, many of the privileges became federally codified rights under the Occupational Safety & Health Act signed by Nixon.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#254

Post by Nasrudith »

pjc50 wrote: post #66
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #2

NDAs and non-compete agreements should not ever be considered as valid contracts by the government.

NDAs need to be heavily restricted, but it's a difficult distinction to draw between "trade secrets of the job" (which arguably should be protected) and "abusive working conditions" (which should not)

Honestly why the hell are trade secrets protected expect for misguised sense of intellectual property that forgets the concept was a contract and not a natural right?

They don't even have the benefit of disclosure which patents were meant to give - to prevent said knowledge being lost. Trade secrets are why we had to investigate Damascus Steel reproduction throughly and still speculate.

They give the useful arts and sciences nothing and yet they get free resources for enforcement.

I believe the proper legal response from the state for breach of trade secrets should be "Wow, sucks to be you!" We really shouldn't be promoting that artificial scarcity and restriction of knowledge.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#255

Post by ceejayoz »

asark wrote: post #59
arethuza wrote: post #15

Maybe 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.

"Facebook made me look at child porn" is probably a headline Facebook would prefer not to have going around.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#256

Post by Sharlin »

p1esk wrote: post #233
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…

How about training a classifier to detect and remove potentially bad stuff, then let the users who uploaded it argue that the classifier made a mistake? Only in those cases have human moderators look at it?

They already have classifiers, of course. It's not like the moderators go through everything posted to FB–you'd need millions of people to do that. What the mods actually do, presumably, is review content reported by users.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#257

Post by zodiac »

_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…

> If minimum wage were $15, they could find another job that paid their basic living expenses.

Why is this necessarily true? Couldn't it be the case that minimum wage were $15 but they still couldn't find any other job?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#258

Post by knd775 »

bamboozled wrote: post #133
arzeth wrote: 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.

Chipmunk voices? Might make it feel less real

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#259

Post by ceejayoz »

Pigo wrote: post #53
arethuza wrote: post #3

Just a warning - I found even a short description of some of the videos they had to watch fairly disturbing. I don't think I could do that job for very long - let alone in a badly run, high pressure environment with low wages.

I don't see how an average person could be expected to witness some of the things mentioned in the article. I didn't have time to read the entire article, but do they have counselors on staff or something? That one paragraph about organs was enough to ruin my day, and it was just text. I'm surprised such a "rash of videos" wasn't in the news somewhere.

> That one paragraph about organs was enough to ruin my day, and it was just text. I'm surprised such a "rash of videos" wasn't in the news somewhere.

I'm left wondering if it was a clip from a horror movie or something. Shitty to see, but not necessarily newsworthy like "live children chopped up for organs" would be.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#260

Post by specialist »

threatofrain wrote: post #209
bumby wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine many people wouldn't. It's potentially shortsighted to have that sort of myopic utility maximizing mindset when it causes you to debase other values like social stability. But in a society that advocates the hustle, I gotta get mine, right? /s

Isn't that something that should be resolved at the social or government level? As opposed to Walmart? The market is good at some things, and that which the market does not naturally provide... we morally expect/beg for? Doesn't a situation like this ask for social or government intervention?

Government imposed open market sanity saved the domestic oil industry.

I think about this every time someone advocates laissez faire (aka Freedom Markets™, corporatism).

Every game needs referees, a ruling body.

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