Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 268 posts

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#141

Post by blackoil »

matz1 wrote: post #92
munificent wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a subset of people who seek this stuff out, yes. Whether or not it is traumatic for them does not strictly follow from that. People come to their choices with all manner of existing problems and conflicts, and they don't always do things in their own best interest.

There are people that really like chocolate and some people that really hate chocolate. Human are so diverse. Is is really hard to believe that there are people that are not negatively affected by this ?

But are they same as the people actively seeking it?

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#142

Post by three_seagrass »

MattGaiser wrote: post #3

They should recruit people on Reddit for this. A large number of them seem perfectly fine with this type of content. There are dedicated communities to all these things. I do not mean this as a hit against Reddit users. It is just that there are small pockets of people who are psychologically capable of tolerating this or even enjoy it. It seems more ethical to hire people from /r/watchpeopledie.

These niche demographics are typically into it for the wrong reasons though, which includes fantasizing about the material (murder, rape, child pornography, etc.).

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#143

Post by three_seagrass »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #11
dmalvarado wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. I would argue that there is some difference between seeing someone fall off a cliff and watching someone being tortured to death.

Then they should run sidebar ads on the gore sites. The point is that there appears to be a subset of the population that is not traumatized by this stuff. We may as well give them an opportunity to put that difference to use. Edit: and saying things like "well clearly these people are already traumatized if they're seeking this out, it's not good for them, we shouldn't give these jobs to them" seems laughably patern…

>Then they should run sidebar ads on the gore sites.

That would do wonders for the Facebook brand.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#144

Post by Spooky23 »

agentdrtran wrote: post #132
kevinskii wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ER staff are paid a lot more, are sometimes even in a union, and also get the benefit of helping people and seeing the effect of their help.

Ever hang out with an ER staffer?

Most of their workload is bullshit. People with colds and sore throats, depressing people using ER as primary care, assholes using 911 to score Medicaid cab vouchers.

And at any time, any number of people can show up with any kind of personal tragedies from stokes to various traumas. My sister quit after a 13 year old bled out from a gsw, and she walked out of the room and got kicked in the head by an prisoner who had been stabbed after he bit the ears off of three other prisoners, and broke the arm of a guard.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#145

Post by three_seagrass »

nitwit005 wrote: post #133
msapaydin wrote: post #95

What 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?

It has been. Most of these sites catch a ton of images and video automatically when they are similar enough to prior known content. That doesn't matter from a staff point of view though. You have a queue to work through. You'll be putting in an 8 hour day dealing with the stuff the system doesn't catch. The automation just means they don't need as much staff.

Yep. One way to view automation with machine vision / perception is that it can cover ~85-95% of the true positives.

You're still going to get false positives and false negatives that need human review, and at a scale of Facebook, that's a lot of humans.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#146

Post by SamuelAdams »

msapaydin wrote: post #95

What 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?

It's a really hard problem to automate. You can scan photos against a list of hashes to sort out known bad / illegal content, but new content is generated every single day. Also YouTube has increased the amount of auto-moderation but that leads to many legitimate videos being taken down, with little recourse for those legitimate users. Some examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487403

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5068626

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19065859

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#147

Post by philwelch »

three_seagrass wrote: post #143
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they should run sidebar ads on the gore sites. The point is that there appears to be a subset of the population that is not traumatized by this stuff. We may as well give them an opportunity to put that difference to use. Edit: and saying things like "well clearly these people are already traumatized if they're seeking this out, it's not good for them, we shouldn't give these jobs to them" seems laughably patern…

>Then they should run sidebar ads on the gore sites. That would do wonders for the Facebook brand.

Have a subcontracting company do the moderation and have them run the sidebar ads.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#148

Post by victoriasun »

MattGaiser wrote: post #3

They should recruit people on Reddit for this. A large number of them seem perfectly fine with this type of content. There are dedicated communities to all these things. I do not mean this as a hit against Reddit users. It is just that there are small pockets of people who are psychologically capable of tolerating this or even enjoy it. It seems more ethical to hire people from /r/watchpeopledie.

But are people like that people you want as your co-workers?

Serious question, I don't mean this facetiously. I think is an extremely complex question and I wonder if introducing someone who is openly comfortable with gore is dangerous to the psychological health of the company.

For example, at a previous company a co-worker publicly shared, without a trigger warning and in great detail, a very gorey thing he enjoyed watching to relax. Lots of people were extremely disturbed by this -- not disturbed by him, per se, but disturbed that he shared this without any kind of warning. I don't even resent him despite myself being pretty disturbed because what one considers normal is subjective, and if you regularly relax to this content you probably don't realise that this might not be anyone else's cup of tea. But it really makes me wonder -- what if the guy who sits next to me starts telling me that ISIS beheadings are relaxing to him?

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#149

Post by Kiro »

intopieces wrote: post #94

Every time you use Facebook, see an advertisement there, or click it, every time you share content on Facebook and get others to engage with that platform, you are contributing to a platform that is directly responsible for human psychological harm, in many different ways. Same for Twitter, and for Reddit, and Instagram... and probably TikTok. I don’t believe the use of these platforms can be considered ethical.

You are commenting on one of those platforms right now.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#150

Post by Spooky23 »

stickfigure wrote: post #126
indigochill wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I get what you're saying, but you would have to look for traits and develop processes to make an environment that people could do well in.

Big companies like Facebook (although they are not alone) don't do that. That costs money. They use disposable workers, like on-shore or off-shore contractors, and do industrial-style quotas/piecework methods to maximize productivity.

When you hire like that, you'll have a normal distribution of people. On the left there will be pre-broken people who get pleasure from watching decapitation videos and nasty shit, on the right you'll have people who are traumatized and broken by the work, and in the middle you have people who will cope for some period of time, and burn out.

Post reply on HN