Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#561

Post by mistersquid » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 3:36 AM UTC

esoterica wrote: post #549

ihm wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every single union in the planet was formed because workers wanted to improve their own wages and working conditions. Nobody organizes to protect other people’s interests. Why should engineers be the only rubes on the planet using their bargaining power to help other people instead of themselves?

> Every single union in the planet was formed because workers wanted to improve their own wages and working conditions. Nobody organizes to protect other people’s interests.

This overlooks the possibility that workers with different statuses can recognize commonality and, so, unionize as a coalition.

This is precisely what happened when the graduate students at the University of Virginia unionized with the University classified staff under UAW for health care and a living wage in 1996ish (? IIRC).

Workers can unionize across pay grades and professional classification if and when it suits such workers to do so.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#562

Post by lazyasciiart » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 3:45 AM UTC

nonwifehaver3 wrote: post #506

lazyasciiart wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you may have guessed from the downvotes, this is not even close to accurate. It should have been possible for you to realize this was inaccurate simply from how trivial the problem looked to you in comparison to how much effort is being spent on it.

I genuinely don't understand how an average Facebook user would encounter videos like those described in the article. Is it some recommender system gone awry?

As far as I know, mostly because people post them as comments on public or widely shared items, along with "get free sunglasses" and every other kind of spam. There are tons of these public posts from pages that do news, memes, politics, trolling, regular advertising, whatever.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#563

Post by nibbula » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 3:46 AM UTC

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…

"Strong" AI is a person, whom you also shouldn't mistreat. Let's hope they think the same about us.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#564

Post by allthecybers » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #501

hashkb wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Their profit is not proof they are valuable, because they are willfully abdicating responsibility for the damage they cause, and, further, involving themselves in government debates over their own regulation. Advertising businesses are inherently suspect, and when one is addictive and potentially enabling electio…

> my opinion of course is that FB, Insta, etc (any advertising product with push notifications and/or infinite scroll) ought to be illegal. In 50 or 100 years we'll all recognize that social networks are like internet cigarettes. Well cigarettes are still not illegal, so we have some ways to go...

This was an earlier comment that disappeared. Frankly I ask myself consistently "what net value does Facebook add to the world?" other than being a 100% optional vice.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#565

Post by allthecybers » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:07 AM UTC

deusofnull wrote: post #443

anon029102 wrote: post #48

Guy Rosen and other execs within Integrity team continually skirt their responsibilities here. They claim they're doing better, but the second-order effects of crappy work conditions and demands keep cropping up. Zuck says one day we will hopefully be able to AI-away this integrity work (especially the most traumatizing), but he does not say a whisper as to improving working conditions or pay while the work needs to…

You're right, Facebook is a broken company. Along that point, we should break it up.

I agree and in a more enlightened future I hope we can assess companies like this on their net benefit to society and apply penalties when they act in a way that negatively affects society.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#566

Post by Fjolsvith » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:49 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #348

Fjolsvith wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Facebook lawyers recently argued to a judge that there is no expectation of privacy on Facebook.

I’m not defending them but there is a distinction between Facebook using your private data for mining and displaying it to random strangers. Any sort of user-driven moderation policy would need to have a way to handle that or people would stop using the service.

Isn't everything you post on FB available for anyone to browse?

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#567

Post by krick » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:52 AM UTC

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 understand the arguments about supply and demand of labour, but I'd have more respect for Facebook if they demonstrated awareness of this issue.

It is a very politically correct statement, which, as it usually happens with politically correct statements, really says nothing. I mean, what exactly do you propose they should do about it?

I am the last person to defend Facebook, but, seriously, they are running a business. That is, essentially, finding a way to do/own/produce some stuff while spending less on it than you receive for it. And cost management is all about supply and demand.

After all, it's not like Facebook wants to pay engineers $150k/year and for them to be happy. It needs good engineers and the only way to get them is to keep them happy, or else they stop coming. Engineers are not really special, they are not even exactly more necessary than cleaners, and loaders, and content moderators. The only difference is, demand for them is higher than supply.

And that would be tragic in a sense, if everyone would be randomly assigned a role and if you draw an "engineer" you are lucky, but if you draw a "content moderator" you are not. Or if we were talking about some factory in some giant village in Vietnam, where no matter how smart you are and no matter what you do, you'll be working much harder job in conditions far, far worse than described for $500/year and you really don't have any choice.

But we are not. No, this is Florida, $30K/year and these are people choosing the job of content moderator over a job of an engineer, either because they don't want to or cannot do otherwise. They while many of them may have stories that can be seen as tragic (because who hasn't, really?), they are no more victims than anyone else born into living a life on the Earth. And thus, hardly entitled to anything.

Let me be clear: I really hate Facebook and I find companies with a modus operandi like Congizant's distasteful to say the least. And I can see how Cognizant can be held accountable for giving somebody a false hope, luring into doing the job while promising something else. But what exactly do you want for Facebook to do? They want a service as cheap as possible, they get asked a given price, they agree. That's it. It won't save their reputation after an article like this (because, well, public relations...), but it seems just fair.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#568

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:53 AM UTC

plankers wrote: post #462

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.

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 organization. If I were conspiracy-minded, I might even say this was by design.

>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.

Adopt the Danish model, make it mandatory for companies with workforces over a certain size to at least vote on unionisation. Will shift the default from not being unionised to being unionised except for cases were the workforce is actively convinced its detrimental.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#569

Post by nojvek » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:57 AM UTC

ngold wrote: post #522

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…

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.

Something something. Corporations are hive mind AI optimizing for growth and profit. They don’t give a shit. Amazon doesn’t give a shit unless it impacts the bottom line. Google barely has support and YouTube kids is full of questionable content.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#570

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #179

enibundo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they think that flagging shit online is easy and pays well to later find themselves with anxiety in the house. This kind of stuff is never easy to pin point

Maybe when they apply. But from the sound of things that idea would vanish in the first week.

many do leave as the turnover rate is extremely high, but with an increasingly underempoyed white collar workforce and rising rent and healthcare and education cost there's a pretty huge pool of reserve labour to churn through.

This is really just a giant meatgrinder for the population outside of the "cognitive elite" class and probably a good sign of things to come for the workplace of the future of half of the population.