> Work stopped while we were there to ensure we did not see any Facebook user’s personal information.
Do users know that their personal information is being looked through by employees who don't work for Facebook?
Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
331–340 of 620 posts
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#332This 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…
>> 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.
Or the opposite. People flock to the internet to see this stuff, the material that isn't on TV or even dedicated commercial websites. They get to view it in the privacy of their homes, a secret between them an their trusted "friends" on facebook. Facebook knows that if it really cracks down, if cops bust down doors over this stuff, that people will go elsewhere to share horrible material. So facebook does a poor job of moderation, one just good enough to avoid new regulation but not so good as to actually make a difference.
Advertisers care about eyeballs. They may claim to not want to be associated with X or Y content, but in reality they would rather be in front of an audience than not.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Reddit is a bit different than what was suggested here, since moderators are not a rotating position there and this encourages power trips.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with lower resolutions, fingerprinting (on a frame level) should still work relatively well, shouldn't it? If you get a certain level of confidence on each frame - if you have 80% of the frames with 80% confidence to be the same as $someVideo, that ought to be good enough overall to not get false positives but catch repeat views - how many 30s videos will randomly share 80% of their frames with a 90s video of an…
I started playing FFXIV a bit over a month ago. During that time, there was someone in the Novice Network (new player advice channel in game) posted a "does this look like an okay PLD build?" with a URL. I click the URL and it is a video of something being held down and attacked with a hatchet or something and it sounded like a child (as soon as I realized what was going on after like 1-2 seconds, I closed the video…
That sounds tough and like you were in luck that you reacted quickly.
> Reason I give that anecdote is for the last part: I don't think it is about monetizing this type of content and that they're only after the shock factor of it.
Possibly, I assume so as well, but I believe there's a difference in commitment. If I'm making money off of something, I'm going to put a lot of effort (at least until I approach $0) into evading filters, and can easily pay for advanced technical solutions (possibly hand-crafted for my purpose). If it's to mess with people, my effort and monetary investment will be much smaller. If I need to put significant time into each video upload only for it to be blocked after a handful of views, it doesn't scale. Trolls are an issue, of course, but video seems to be so hard to create/manipulate at scale and easier (I think) to check (compared to text for example), at least until there will be something like GPT2 for video.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's kinda how free markets work.
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.
no, that's not why we have a whole host of workers' rights in the US.
we have a whole host of workers' rights in the US because people were fighting for workers' rights in the US, some of whom were injured or killed.
(ed: clarity)
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Currently we have a surplus of actual jobs, it's just that a large number of them pay sub-living wages. If those were forced to pay more - even if it meant some of them disappeared - many more people would have the opportunity to climb out of poverty. Edit: I may have misspoken when I said "surplus". What I was referring to is the very low unemployment rate we currently have, despite large numbers of people - with "j…
> Currently we have a surplus of actual jobs
No, we don't. An actual job is what happens when the willingness to pay for labor connects with the willingness to provide it for pay.
What you are seem to be referring to (additional willingness to purchase labor at prices below that that people are willing to accept) is not a surplus, it is is the normal condition of demand (and a parallel thing exists normally with supply, where there are people willing to provide something beyond what is currently being transacted in the market, but at higher-than-market prices.)
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with lower resolutions, fingerprinting (on a frame level) should still work relatively well, shouldn't it? If you get a certain level of confidence on each frame - if you have 80% of the frames with 80% confidence to be the same as $someVideo, that ought to be good enough overall to not get false positives but catch repeat views - how many 30s videos will randomly share 80% of their frames with a 90s video of an…
>how many 30s videos will randomly share 80% of their frames with a 90s video of an animal being abused? If a powerful actor wants the 30s video removed, and knows it would be removed if it shared 80% of its frames with a 90s video of an animal being abused, then it would not be technically difficult to engineer such a 90s video.
Yeah, but that works once or twice, and then the defense catches on. Sure, it's not a perfect solution, but rather like spam filters, it gets you pretty close.
Also, I don't assume that powerful actors are the issue here - they'll likely just call their contacts at a high price law firm and they in turn call FB to remove some video.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No need to be left wondering. While I'm not sure these are the videos mentioned, it's not hard to find some just by googling for it. Or maybe don't, I wish I didn't.
I don't doubt you can find all sorts of horrifying video.
I feel like I'd have seen media reports of widely-shared videos featuring live, conscious kids being vivisected in order to harvest their organs.
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#339Earlier 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?
No, its more like the devs have the necessary marketplace leverage and fallback to either put a quash on that notion or move on to another less ridiculous job. Don't think for a minute devs wouldn't be treated the same (and in some places ARE) if the corporate c-levels could get away with it without bleeding talent that is expensive to re-acquire. I am not, by any means, a Workers of the World Unite kinda person, but…
Historically, unions are a tried and true way for improving working conditions and average compensation. Of course, that's also the reason why they are so vehemently opposed...
Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
#340This 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…
150k a year in Silicon Valley is similar to 30k a year in the midwest...
Where are the moderators living ?