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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

#421

Post by mythrowaway1124 »

meerita wrote: post #419
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…

"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." I bet this can be done with ML and IA instead human power. Yet, FB uses their human cattle to censor conservative voices.

Good luck! There's at least a billion dollars in it for you if you figure out how to do this.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#422

Post by kartan »

meerita wrote: post #419
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…

"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." I bet this can be done with ML and IA instead human power. Yet, FB uses their human cattle to censor conservative voices.

> I bet this can be done with ML and IA instead human power.

IA and ML work in bulk. But they misclassify things that a human easily can discern.

Think Tesla VS Google. Google wants a self-driving car, and that is not working yet. Tesla wants a car that helps you to drive and that is good enough.

It's order of magnitude easier to be almost always correct that to be correct all the time. And you only need one kiddie porn video in your Facebook feed to start to worry about Facebook.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#423

Post by bksenior »

crooked-v wrote: post #414
emn13 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relying on congress to respond to public issues is fundamentally weaker now, and weakening by the year due to the duopoly in politics: any issue one side takes up is immediately something that - if possible - is criticized and turned into a point of differentiation; and media are growing into that too (online media already are highly polarized). Whatever small forces of reasonable consensus remain aren't enough to ad…

> any issue one side takes up is immediately something that - if possible - is criticized and turned into a point of differentiation This kind of "bothsame" response willfully overlooks that one party has gone to substantial lengths to offer compromises on bills, appointees, and policy goals, while the other very much hasn't.

Love this

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#424

Post by Const-me »

meruru wrote: post #277
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.

>likely going to acquire mental illnesses I find hard to believe humans are so sensitive that some visual stimulation is going to give them mental illnesses. We evolved in an environment where violence was part of real life and a real threat to our own well being, seeing it on a screen will elicit emotions we may not be used to in modern life, but causing mental illness is a stretch.

> We evolved in an environment where violence was part of real life and a real threat to our own well being

It's beneficial for survival to have some strong reaction on observing violence. Could be "charge", "run for your life", or something else, but it was never "click a mouse button and move on to the next violence scene". Similar for gore, evolutionary correct reaction is "run and/or vomit".

People who failed to react in a strong way did not pass genes: joined the violence scene they observed, caught the same decease and joined the gore scene they observed.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#425

Post by megous »

marak830 wrote: post #361
meruru wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At that point, if you don't have a reaction(from seeing it multiple times), its probably tome to seek professional help. You're already assuming there must be something wrong with me because I'm not getting scandalized by the idea of seeing violence. That's exactly the kind of reaction that makes me skeptic. Just so it's clear, I do dislike seeing violence, I just don't think it's that big a deal in general.

No I was using a low level difficult thing to watch, instead of a horrifying thing to watch. If you think watching child porn to rate the videos as safe or unsafe for a platform such as Facebook or youtube, and that seeing cp is something you can handle multiple times safely, then I urge you to seek some help. In all honestly, being able to ignore multiple videos like that - which you can believe in their primary are…

Having compassion doesn't mean breaking down when seeing [eg.] gutted child on a screen.

You can still know it's wrong, feel sympathy and want to help, etc.

Where I'd draw the line is seeing that, and wanting/asking to kill more, or enjoying that, or feeling the need to justify the act, or not stopping to consider the act.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#426

Post by Apocryphon »

president wrote: post #357
bksenior wrote: post #252

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.

> Just publicly shame the company and ultimately they change or congress passes laws. This just doesn't work in today's world. If it did, Equifax wouldn't be thriving the way it still does today.

How does the average consumer directly interact with Equifax? Unlike a meat producer, an amphorous credit agency isn't something you can just boycott.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#427

Post by dRaBoQ »

neuro wrote: post #395

This seems to be the place Cognizant Technology Solutions Woodlands2 7725 Woodland Center Blvd, Tampa, FL 33614 There's another big story here, it may get more horrific, from browsing their phone directory most of their "employees" appear to be people of south Asian nationality. Given the circumstances and their predatory behavior, I imagine they are also taking advantage of H1Bs.

Where do you see their phone directory ?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#428

Post by jandrese »

saagarjha wrote: post #360
acdha wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not really a shortcut around having employees do it because Facebook has a significant amount of private content which users will not tolerate being shared, standards vary widely (imagine a vegan flagging every picture with leather visible or a post about eating meat as obscene — if you're requiring this, do you just disable their account once you notice it?), and especially because it's the target of coordin…

You could have a system where multiple people flagging certain content would be a signal to give it manual review.

This already exists on Facebook.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#429

Post by Apocryphon »

H8crilA wrote: post #407
rock_hard wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s common practice for them to do so. Not just at Facebook, but YouTube and other platforms. It’s management 101

Oversight over key quality metrics (including understanding what exactly raters/moderators do) is a VP or even SVP level job. It's critical if your entire org's goal is to deliver ever improving data quality at reasonable latency and reasonable reliability (example: Google Search). Not to mention that, in data driven orgs, the launch/no launch debates are focused on those metrics. So if you want to call the shots you…

You and the GP claim this, yet if these execs have truly been exposed to the worst that gets posted to their platforms, why has there been no appreciable change made? Unless they're so hardened to it they can't emphasize with the horrors that they're asking people to face.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#430

Post by joezydeco »

dillonmckay wrote: post #418
joezydeco wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this as a hidden criteria for judging a company during an interview cycle. I always ask to use the bathroom and then see how clean it is, and if it looks like it's been maintained. I visited one private company where I talked to the owner - his office was plastered with pictures of his racing Porsche but the bathroom had rusted metal and peeling paint. Took me about 5 seconds to see where his priorities lay…

The other red-flag was seeing all the framed photos on the CEO’s desk, of his family. All the pictures were facing away from him, so it seemed like he was advertising his family to anybody sitting in front of his desk. Maybe he didn’t like looking at them? Very bizarre.

Wow, that's messed up.

All I can figure is that he's trying to soften or deflect anger at him when people come into the room. How can you be mad at him when he's just a simple family man?

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