371–380 of 620 posts
You ever read Upton Sinclair's the jungle? It's a tale as old as time. Just publicly shame the company and ultimately they change or congress passes laws. This is a major reason the media works this way, it's part of American democracy.
I believe Sinclair's goal with the jungle was to expose the working condition for the benefit of the workers but the takeaway was how disgusting our food was
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://twitter.com/lil_yenta/status/1140788295175233536 edit: if it was not clear, facebook is in fact part of society (by definition) and their responsibility is proportional to their role in society, no more no less.
Yes, and taxes + UBI would represent that proportion. This meme is also only ridiculous because of the $100 figure. What if someone paid you $20k to fuck off. $100k to fuck off?
There are some kinds of nonviolent behavior we don't allow because we (I guess we is majority of society?) think it's wrong, often around issues of financial exploitation. For example, even if you are mentally sound you can't sell yourself into indentured servitude because that tends to only happen when someone with power exploits someone desperate, often (but not always) due to reasons out of their control.
UBI is basically an artificial wage. Like a lot of things in life, a wage is a negotiation between two entities of vastly different levels of power. As every public company proudly proclaims, the value of what employees do for them is far far less then the value the employees receive.
Why do you think those workers accept this fact? They like getting less value than they generated? It's clearly the result of an exploitative power dynamic - one side has to work or not eat, the other does not.
If you think someone should not have medicine and food dangled over their head in work negations, the answer is workers need to be paid in real value of the capital that they create and that needs to law.
I hope one day our wages are looked back on like no minimum wage, the 6 day 14+ hr work day, child labor, indentured servitude, slavery and etc which were often viewed as normal at their time but now disgusting.
This GIF is mocking the idea of UBI and while for sure a silly meme, has an element of truth IMO.
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 t…
To add to this, some degree of pixelation would help without impacting the accuracy of assessments.
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.
It makes me aware of a curious dichotomy about content moderation on Facebook. On one hand, they have publicly committed to stem the flow of "Fake News", whatever that means, on their platform. Now on the other hand, we have this article about the suffering of contractors who's task is to block content that is too real. I guess this places Facebook's platform into a category with theme parks like Disney Land, where t…
In fact it's their very realness that makes them especially horrifying.
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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?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
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…
>> 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…
There's a whole section of adtech dedicated to brand safety.
I believe it's over the top[1] but it's something marketing folks do care about.
Also the good old pop up ads were created for that reason, aeons ago.
[[1] https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/advertisers-embrace-n...
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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…
I agree with your point about the site being a bad idea, so maybe your first point was tongue-in-cheek. But displaying reported child pornography to people outside of your controlled environment? Not a great idea...
So yeah, it was tongue in cheek, with a side of reductio.
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.
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)
The chief information security officer in my organization came from our state police where he headed the internet crimes against children division. People on his team had to watch videos like the ones described in the article. Despite having all hardened officers on his team, team members regularly cried at their desks while watching videos. His team members had to be taken off-duty for weeks every six months to recover. They had mandatory counseling even when off-duty.
I would think FB and other large companies could look at the measures taken by police forces with similarly disturbing jobs as a guideline for the contractors.