There are some things I will explicitly avoid in projects I'm working on. One of them is allowing picture or video uploads to users if the service is free. There's no low-risk, cost effective solution for moderating it, and in my country we also don't have safe-harbour type laws, so any content on the platform is your responsibility.
The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
121–130 of 268 posts
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#122How can I become a partime fb content moderator? Is it possible to become one online and work remotely? Or must work from the fb camp? I want to test if it can cause me any trauma
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic so forgive me if this is off-base, but there are REAL people who are dealing with trauma from moderating content so you don't need to "test it out" and validate.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#123how do you become a Facebook moderator?
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#124If you haven’t seen The Cleaners, I highly recommend it.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#125Is Facebook worth it? Is it worth the trauma?
if it wasn't worth it, people would not do such jobs and people would not use Facebook, so apparently for a lot of people it is worth it.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#126It's probably a bit controversial to say this, but haven't large sites had to deal with these problems for years by the time the likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Instagram/whatever came around? It's obviously horrible doing this as a job and it's obviously a bit more common on Facebook than say, a large old school internet forum, but... at least in this case people are paid to do this. Reddit mods and old school for…
>at least in this case people are paid to do this. I've done commercial moderation before and I would sooner go jobless than go back to exposing myself to the kinds of things people have to when doing this professionally. It's the kind of things you wish there was a brain cleaning solution for, but there isn't so it's stuck there basically forever (though I suspect the alcoholism rate is higher among people who have…
This seems like something specific to the individual. Maybe this isn't the job for you, but there's probably enough people "made of different stuff" that could handle it? I feel like there's a subtext in this discussion that "nobody can handle it" or "you have to be a monster to work this job" but that's just not true.
Just out of college in the mid-90s, I worked for a few months at a small local software company in the last throws of death. As a last grasp at survival, all the programmers switched to doing cold call sales. With phones.
I would stare at mutilated children all day long rather than go back to cold calling. I was miserable and I hated every moment of every day until the company (happily, for me) closed up. Yet I know people who somehow think it's perfectly normal to dial random numbers and try to pitch them something. They're made of different stuff.
I've talked to people who make the same claim about computer programming. They'd rather starve.
Facebook has 10,000 moderators. I'm pretty sure there are at least 10k people in the world who are psychologically fit for content policing. It's doesn't have to be for everyone.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#127What 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?
The issue is that this is adversarial in nature. Certainly there are ML systems catching content before moderators.. however since it is adversarial people are pivoting to circumvent the automated systems.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am guessing that by now plenty of data has already been generated which could be used to train future systems..
I'm guessing you don't actually understand the complexity involved. How does it differentiate between normal ranting and hate speech? How is hate speech classified in the US vs Saudi Arabia? How does it tell the difference between someone asking a child innocent questions and asking them sexually-related questions on camera? Does the algorithm get trained to flag videos about depression that might lead to suicide, or…
Certainly there is more complexity than spam filters, and cultural differences, subtle nuances which are hard to train a system to auto-classify; things that need to be generalized to new cases that arises- that may be wrongly classified in the beginning, etc. Nevertheless such systems can be built from simple cases to more difficult ones step by step and gradually reduce the demand on humans to perform these tasks. Based on some other comments on this thread, I realize FB is already using these methods mostly in languages with plenty of data, and someone also in this thread has made an interesting comment about using machine translation to apply these systems to other languages. I think this will be less of a problem in the near future. (edited)
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#129The censors working for Facebook are traumatized by their work.
Strange. I feel nothing. Neither pity, nor sympathy, just nothing.
Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators
#130That 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…
It would be great if there were a way to make content moderation more humane, but perhaps this is like saying that it would be great if we could make hospital emergency room work more humane. It is unavoidably traumatic, and ER staff are known to detach and use dark humor as a coping mechanism. Content moderation is a similarly noble and difficult profession.