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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

#521

Post by rhizome »

ummwhat wrote: post #492
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'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…

>Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not

I don't think it's a problem any more than weather is a "problem" that required the invention of the roof. As far as user-generated content goes, it's easy to invent the hose, but the faucet is much more complex.

It's irresponsible to provide only acceleration ("reach," "virality," etc.) for information without also implementing brakes. Moderation has been a known fix for decades, but people like Zuck -- in disposition and inexperience -- won't launch anything human-powered, and moderation requires a human eye. Fuck us, right?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#522

Post by ngold »

ummwhat wrote: post #492
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'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…

15 billion dollars in pure profit. You could pay a living wage with health benefits, or you could hire twice as many people and have everyone work less while paying more.

This is just Facebook being cheap.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#523

Post by chris11 »

darkpuma wrote: post #317
_bxg1 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear that they stayed after any illusion of that fell away.

Maybe it's an illusion, or maybe it isn't. That depends on the individual in question. If somebody's previous work experience is laying tar down on roofs, they may consider the change to an office job to be well worth the added emotional toll. Due to the low physicality of the work, there are likely people who consider it easy work, despite the psychological impact that seems obvious to you or me.

I had a really short contract at a major tech company. It was a completely different situation, I felt that I was respected and treated well. But it was a very low paid/low skilled job. I didn't see much of any room for growth. The biggest benefit to me was that it got me an interview for an internship with that company when I went to school for CS.

I don't expect these contractors to get much long term benefit from the position. And it sounds like most quit or get fired.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#524

Post by zamber »

ihm wrote: post #474
Miner49er wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook won't do anything to help these moderaters unless the cost of the negative PR exceeds the cost of doing something. Engineers at FB could help achieve this by causing agitation, for sure. Maybe the best solution is for the moderaters to unionize.

The union would be stronger if it included the engineers too, who have more leverage.

I'm convinced that unionizing at this scale does not work. They'll always find cheaper people to do the grunt work which presumably is there only to teach the AI. Maybe when the AI is stable enough this AI "caretaker" position will take over and the burden of traumatic content will be alleviated. Maybe.

Up until then people should unionize. Do whatever it takes to create a workplace whichd by human eyes at all, or worst case just once.

reply

Miner49er 10 hours ago [-]

Facebook won't do anything to help these moderaters unless the cost of the negative PR exceeds the cost of doing something. Engineers at FB could help achieve this by causing agitation, for sure.

Maybe the best solution is for the moderaters to unionize.

reply

plankers 1 hour ago [-]

If you can think of a practical way to unionize workers on a 1-2 year contract with a high turnover rate, I'd love to hear it.

The deck is stacked against employee organizatio does not drain sanity from people.

Personally I understand browsing toxic content to foster "immunity" or at least familiarity. Doing it for money sounds like a lose-lose scenario. Call centers seem to sound better given the conditions.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#525

Post by dragonwriter »

hashkb wrote: post #502
otterley wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moderators are employees of the contracted organization (Cognizant, in this case). They’re not employees of FB.

Cognizant pays them hourly; they are referred to as "contractors" multiple times in the article, while the word "salary" does not appear.

Hourly employees are still employees. Salary v. Hourly is completely different distinction from employee/contractor (you can have an hourly or fixed monthly/annual contract rate, and you can get either model as an employee, though salary is more common if your pay and working conditions make you an FLSA exempt employee, since otherwise you might need to be treated as hourly for overtime and certain other things anyway.)

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#526

Post by invalidOrTaken »

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.

>I don't see how an average person could be expected to witness some of the things mentioned in the article.

I'm no fan of Facebook, but in their defense, this is sort of the point.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#527

Post by zild3d »

debacle wrote: post #185
sandworm101 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If it's a shit job that isn't worth the pay, people won't do it. That assumes perfect knowledge. As mentioned in the article, these moderators often do not understand what they are getting into until long after they have committed to the job. Once you have quit a previous job, moved, setup your new life, only then do you realize your new "brand consultant" job means watching kittens die all day. Jobs like this als…

Nobody moves for $30k a year.

That's really absurd to say, do you realize that $30k/yr is in the top 4% globally?

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?...

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#528

Post by AlexandrB »

Pigo wrote: post #369
ceejayoz wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really seems important to know whether the video is real or a horror movie.

Not from a PTSD point of view. If these workers think it’s real, it’ll have the same psychological effect as the real thing.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#529

Post by chris11 »

Panini_Jones wrote: post #520
empath75 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The assumption is that Facebook is selecting the contracting agencies based on performance or cost. If Cognizant's performance doesn't meet the Facebook's standards they will get dropped, the same thing will happen Cognizant isn't competitive on price.

This downward pressure ends up directly impacting moderators. Cognizant needs to keep payroll costs low so they don't lose the contract, and the contracted accuracy target of 98% seems unrealistic. So moderators end up fearing for their jobs when they don't meet accuracy targets.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#530

Post by ummwhat »

rhizome wrote: post #521
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…

> Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not I don't think it's a problem any more than weather is a "problem" that required the invention of the roof. As far as user-generated content goes, it's easy to invent the hose, but the faucet is much more complex. It's irresponsible to provide only acceleration ("reach," "virality," etc.) for information without also…

I think you're view will change when you start putting numbers on it. I'm going to talk about the games in the app store example because it's the instance of the problem that I first thought about and it is easier to put a monetary value on an app than on a comment.

Let's suppose Apple wants to make sure every game in their store gets at least 5 ratings. To do this they are going to pay people to play each game for 5 min and then assign a rating. In an hour a curator can get through 12 games. Over an 8 hour day thats 96 games. Apple would need to hire about 7 (iirc) full time employees just to give every game one rating. We wanted every game to have 5 ratings. Assuming that users on average provide one rating (but sometimes 0), we still need curators to provide the other 4. That means Apple would be employing 28 full time employees just to get their content minimally curated.

Let's use the salary from the article and say each curator costs 30k a year. That means this whole department of curation is going to cost about 900k a year.

Most of what they are sorting is going to be shovelware anyway. To justify the cost of this department, the curators need to find gems, content that's really good but would have otherwise been looked over. They need to find 900k of gems per year. Considering the average earning of an app, this is just barely plausible. If you want to do anything more advanced with your curation, like have the curators generate key words or figure out which demographic might like it, your budget is blown for sure.

IDK how the economics of comment curation works out, but I bet it's even worse. After all, no one is even paying for comments, and making a comment is way less effort than making an app.

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