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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

#511

Post by m463 »

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…

Stuff like this should be brought in-house. You can't outsource responsibility. Engineering and AI/pattern matching should be in the loop as a key ingredient so that a terrible image/video won't have to be viewed by human eyes at all, or worst case just once.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#512

Post by social_quotient »

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'…

I think the same about Uber and the drama with drivers. If the work is so bad, pay so terrible, riders don’t want to pay more, then why hasn’t the market killed itself?

Now we have gov externalities trying to legislate something that shouldn’t have existed?

I’m not saying any of this is write or wrong, I’m just at a loss how people get mad at Uber when the model shouldn’t have made it. Where did the market dynamics go wrong here?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#513

Post by H8crilA »

mikeash wrote: post #491
H8crilA wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look I wish everyone had a nice life, I really do, but markets set salaries while governments sometimes intervene (e.g. by setting a minimum wage). Don't know about the banning situation, that'd require insider Facebook knowledge. I'm sure they ban some people.

The Market Police don’t haul you off if you pay something different than the “market wage.” Markets set a floor on wages by making it so you won’t get enough workers if you pay less. But companies can easily pay more than the floor if they want to. Obviously they don’t want to, because they love money, but it’s ridiculous to frame this as some iron law of markets.

Peace!

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#515

Post by Chazprime »

hashkb wrote: post #495
ummwhat wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked about this somewhere else. What you're seeing is just a manifestation of what I call "the fundamental problem of user created content." Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not. Until we have strong AI, curation is a manual process. Moderators just aren't efficient enough at processing content for their output to pay for a full time salary. You c…

> We can blame Facebook, but the reality is no one has a good solution. We can take a step backwards and eliminate Facebook, Insta, etc from our societies and enact legislation that will govern the second generation of social networks.

Well, to do that you’d need a congress that has the first clue what social media even is, and I’m guessing the US is easily 5-10 years away from that.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#516

Post by hashkb »

Jedi72 wrote: post #505
hashkb wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can blame Facebook, but the reality is no one has a good solution. We can take a step backwards and eliminate Facebook, Insta, etc from our societies and enact legislation that will govern the second generation of social networks.

What legislation? Specifically? What do you want to make law, that they have to hire moderators (which they already do?) or do you want to make it illegal to post "bad things" on the internet?

Let me start by saying that I am not running for elected office because it's a really hard job; even though I might believe I would do it with more integrity and rationality than the next person, I'm also smart enough to realize that everyone thinks that way and I'd probably end up within a standard deviation of average corruption.

What I'm saying, seriously, is that we need a society-wide blameless post-mortem on social networks. It needs to be a slow, careful discussion, where all the stakeholders have their voices heard, and we decide what is good for us all. I don't know that we need them at all, I'm not sure they provide ANY value to ANYONE, but as a non-user I'd of course be open to persuasion by current victims. Erm, users. In the meantime, it should be illegal to operate a social network. Nobody needs to go to prison yet, even though I think it's horrifyingly clear at this point that the ethics are out the window.

One obvious one: advertising and public conversation must always be separated; the same way no public schoolteacher may read scripture in class, it should be illegal for an internet service that hosts public conversation (e.g. Twitter) to allow sponsored content.

We should also establish guidelines for addiction. After cigarettes, drugs, sugar, etc; we should as a society be prepared to understand the various forms that addictive products can take and regulate them aggressively before they become serious problems. UX patterns like infinite scroll, pull-to-refresh, and push notifications are particularly suspect.

I also think we should close the apparent loophole in COPPA that allows parents to post photos of their children on social networks.

> that they have to hire moderators (which they already do?) or do you want to make it illegal to post "bad things" on the internet?

I tend to come down on the "free speech" side of these issues as much as possible; I would prefer unregulated public fora that (perhaps by requiring identity verification) encouraged good-faith participation in substantial discussions. I think if you are just fooling around, maybe you should head down to the bar and get drunk with your friends and do your shit talking there.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#517

Post by ekianjo »

lifeformed wrote: post #279
jumbopapa wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like $30k is an improvement in their lives then, so is it really "too little"?

The word is "exploitive". Desperate people will do things because they have to. If I pay a homeless person $20 to humiliate himself, is that a fair transaction, or an exploitation of the asymmetry between our conditions?

There is no obligation for anyone to do anything. Do you assume that there is no free will and we are all like robots driven by short term profits?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#518

Post by ummwhat »

hashkb wrote: post #495
ummwhat wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked about this somewhere else. What you're seeing is just a manifestation of what I call "the fundamental problem of user created content." Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not. Until we have strong AI, curation is a manual process. Moderators just aren't efficient enough at processing content for their output to pay for a full time salary. You c…

> We can blame Facebook, but the reality is no one has a good solution. We can take a step backwards and eliminate Facebook, Insta, etc from our societies and enact legislation that will govern the second generation of social networks.

How does that solve the problem that the incoming content stream flows faster than any curation mechanism we can economically build today?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#519

Post by dragonwriter »

hashkb wrote: post #516
Jedi72 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What legislation? Specifically? What do you want to make law, that they have to hire moderators (which they already do?) or do you want to make it illegal to post "bad things" on the internet?

Let me start by saying that I am not running for elected office because it's a really hard job; even though I might believe I would do it with more integrity and rationality than the next person, I'm also smart enough to realize that everyone thinks that way and I'd probably end up within a standard deviation of average corruption. What I'm saying, seriously, is that we need a society-wide blameless post-mortem on so…

> What I'm saying, seriously, is that we need a society-wide blameless post-mortem on social networks

Social networks aren't dead, so we can't have a post-mortem.

Also, you can't have a society-wide blameless analytical conversation about anything, especially if there are significant conflicting interests involved; that's not how people work. (It's perhaps noteworthy that even while suggesting this you offer no objective descriptions of impacts with reasoned analysis of contributing factors, instead jumping straight to blame and policy responses, with some labelled as “obvious”.)

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#520

Post by Panini_Jones »

empath75 wrote: post #504
MockObject wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't the buck actually stop with Cognizant management? FB isn't demanding these horrible labor practices, Cognizant is.

They’re paying rates that more or less require it.

Facebook is? What rate does Facebook pay and how much are these Cognizant employees getting paid?
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