Perhaps it's a solution to use brainwave headsets. So whenever the viewer would get too much negative stimulation, the video would stop and the viewer could take a break.
The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
101–110 of 268 posts
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#102That was good article and I think something really needs to be done to make content moderation more humane.
This quote from the article
“It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human.”
reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1].
Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the video that made him quit. He was 24 years old and between jobs in the Bay Area when he got a gig as a moderator for a then-new startup called VideoEgg. Three days in, a video of an apparent beheading came across his queue.
“Oh fuck! I've got a beheading!” he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. “Oh,” he said, “which one?” At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. “I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it.”
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#103Is Facebook worth it? Is it worth the trauma?
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's fair to say the sheer quantity has changed since Facebook first came around (FB predates smartphones for one!) I also think part of the objection here is around off-shoring. It's similar to other complaints about off-shored jobs: we're farming out unpleasant work to people that get paid less and have much less support (e.g. mental health).
> I also think part of the objection here is around off-shoring. It's similar to other complaints about off-shored jobs: we're farming out unpleasant work to people that get paid less and have much less support (e.g. mental health). That's an interesting point, and has me wondering something. If a site like Facebook opened up a volunteer moderator scheme where people could sign up to filter out stuff that broke their…
YouTube tried doing something like this with YouTube Heroes and got tons of backlash for it. Then YouTube tried automating everything away and I'm guessing now people wish they had implemented something like YouTube Heroes instead.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#105This should be the top comment:
If you don’t recognize it, “rest of world” is a ridiculous corporate term commonly used in global business operations. It’s a catch-all phrase that means, basically, “everyone else.” And it generally represents billions of people outside of the Western world. We know that their stories matter. The term “rest of world” is a symptom of a larger problem: a Western-centric worldview that leaves innumerable insights, opportunities and complexity out of the conversation.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#106What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?
>this is probably a dumb question
Not dumb, but I do think it's not thought-through. You're proposing a simple solution to what is a hugely complex problem, and throwing ML at it just isn't going to work. To get "plenty of training data," a human still has to classify all of that, leading to the problem of viewing that much unpalatable content by a human. You also have to train your network, which requires humans to verify the accuracy of training, hence viewing the content again.
If it were as easy as text-based spam filtering, this wouldn't even be a discussion.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#107This is also relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft...
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#108What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?
Perhaps because the training of these systems requires human supervisors?
well, just as in spam filters, some supervisors would be necessary to automate things in the beginning, but eventually this should be less needed?
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#109What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?
>this is probably a dumb question Not dumb, but I do think it's not thought-through. You're proposing a simple solution to what is a hugely complex problem, and throwing ML at it just isn't going to work. To get "plenty of training data," a human still has to classify all of that, leading to the problem of viewing that much unpalatable content by a human. You also have to train your network, which requires humans to…
I am guessing that by now plenty of data has already been generated which could be used to train future systems..
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps because the training of these systems requires human supervisors?
well, just as in spam filters, some supervisors would be necessary to automate things in the beginning, but eventually this should be less needed?
Yes, one would hope so. My guess is that we're still in the data-collection phase. It's probably a tough problem because you want the number of false-negatives to be extremely small.