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The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

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Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#181

Post by shadowgovt »

uniqueid wrote: post #176
shadowgovt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the goal is to prevent users from seeing this content, crowd-sourcing moderation defeats the purpose. Users don't want the back-stop to be "a critical mass of community members object;" for content like this, they want to see zero of it, ever, and will choose to use another site that satisfies that hard constraint if FB cannot.

> they want to see zero of it, ever Many want that, but very few (probably nobody at all, by this point) expect it. > When the goal is to prevent users from > seeing this content, crowd-sourcing moderation > defeats the purpose. It's not actually all-or-nothing, and if it were, it would defeat it no less frequently than paid moderation already does. People tolerated toxic internet content before social media not beca…

What real agency does the system you propose offer? Because one down-moderation from a volunteer moderator is a drop in the bucket.

Meanwhile, if your system requires users to view beheading videos regularly, people will just migrate to a site that doesn't require that.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#182

Post by kevinskii »

Spooky23 wrote: post #144
agentdrtran wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bite one inmate's ear...shame on you.

Bite a 2nd inmate's ear...shame on him.

Bite a 3rd inmate's ear...that's fricking badass.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#183

Post by intopieces »

falcrist wrote: post #180
intopieces wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What specifically is the reason you consider those particular platforms to be unethical, and what is the solution. These platforms are so large that they require hundreds of thousands of moderators in order to remove vile, illegal content, causing trauma for a vast underclass of foreign workers. Here’s a few solutions: Limit the number of people that a person can be friends with to 150, the Dunbar number. Restrict…

Why is size the determining factor, though? Is it just that you're worried about the outsourcing of content moderation? Because other than than the problems are the same. Someone will always need to moderate the content.

Size is not the determining factor. It's a single factor that highly influences the value in posting damaging content. It's clear from the rise of influencers on YT, IG, Twitter, etc -- as well as the prolific use of these platforms by terrorists and other malefactors -- that being able to reach many people with a single post is a significant driver of people to post content.

My concern is not primarily with the outsourcing of moderation, but with the type of moderation that is required. There are ways to limit the kind of content that people post. Making things less sharable is one way of doing that. Creating barriers to entry is another. My list of suggestions encompasses both. Of course, these are two suggestions which are antithetical to the ad-riddle, growth-driven social network model, so there is no way they would ever be implemented.

I should add another solution to my wish-list: remove ads entirely.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#184

Post by stickfigure »

SeymourGlass wrote: post #169
three_seagrass wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem to be specific to an individual when there are class actions lawsuits and many people reporting to suffer from it. There exist jobs, like slaughterhouse knockers, which are linked to causing PTSD and increased criminal behavior. It's not far fetched to believe these moderator jobs do too.

Yeah, and they made an interesting point about how these problems are compounded by the lack of mental health awareness and the difficulties of defending mental health trauma in a court of law in countries like India and the United States. I didn't think of that before.

Before I accept this is a serious problem, I'd need to see some statistics. The article is just a bunch of anecdotes. If this job is hazardous, quantify it?

It wasn't that long ago HN was abuzz about large numbers of suicides at Foxconn... until someone realized that the suicide rate was actually slightly below the community average. I simply don't trust arguments without statistics anymore.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#186

Post by zacharycohn »

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…

Have you ever had a job where you have to look at pictures of mutilated children all day long?

I don't think many people are immune to PTSD, but I suppose sociopaths need jobs too. But I'm not sure you want to hire a department of sociopaths.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#187

Post by twblalock »

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.

This argument applies to any platform that lets users upload videos. There is nothing wrong with that kind of site in itself.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#188

Post by twblalock »

intopieces wrote: post #153
Kiro wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are commenting on one of those platforms right now.

HackerNews is a limited-focus link aggregation and comment platform. It doesn't require the kind of moderation that larger scale, broad-focus social media platforms do. I don't envy the work that Dan and Scott have to do in the slightest, but I don't think they'll end up with PTSD from it. At least, that's what I gathered when I read "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News"[0], especially this description of it: "…

So you think the only ethical sites are the ones that operate a small scale?

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#189

Post by falcrist »

intopieces wrote: post #183
falcrist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is size the determining factor, though? Is it just that you're worried about the outsourcing of content moderation? Because other than than the problems are the same. Someone will always need to moderate the content.

Size is not the determining factor. It's a single factor that highly influences the value in posting damaging content. It's clear from the rise of influencers on YT, IG, Twitter, etc -- as well as the prolific use of these platforms by terrorists and other malefactors -- that being able to reach many people with a single post is a significant driver of people to post content. My concern is not primarily with the outs…

> My concern is not primarily with the outsourcing of moderation, but with the type of moderation that is required.

But the problem doesn't go away when you shrink the size of the social media site. The same people will still try to post disturbing content. In fact, you're giving them more places to post that content, so potentially more people will have to moderate it.

> There are ways to limit the kind of content that people post. Making things less sharable is one way of doing that. Creating barriers to entry is another. My list of suggestions encompasses both.

Your suggestions can be implemented on smaller websites as well as larger ones.

It seems like your issue is with the ease of access to social media. Thus your solution is to limit access. However, I don't think there's a reasonable implementation of your idea that could work. Nor do I think any kind of social media is going to want to go that route. It doesn't matter if the site is funded by ads or is trying to grow. The point of these sites is to share content. People don't want to limit that.

Also, breaking large social media sites into smaller ones makes it much more difficult to deal with troublesome individuals. Right now, it only takes a few bans before you're blocked from most mainstream sites. If we had, say, 10× the number of sites, that's 10× the number of bans required to get these individuals out of the system and 10× the number of moderators who had to look at their content before banning them.

I'm not saying there's no solution here, but I think people are misidentifying the problem. We all want simple answers and simple solutions even when there aren't any.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#190

Post by uniqueid »

shadowgovt wrote: post #181
uniqueid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they want to see zero of it, ever Many want that, but very few (probably nobody at all, by this point) expect it. > When the goal is to prevent users from > seeing this content, crowd-sourcing moderation > defeats the purpose. It's not actually all-or-nothing, and if it were, it would defeat it no less frequently than paid moderation already does. People tolerated toxic internet content before social media not beca…

What real agency does the system you propose offer? Because one down-moderation from a volunteer moderator is a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, if your system requires users to view beheading videos regularly, people will just migrate to a site that doesn't require that.

If I had to come up with a system, it would be some sort of reputation hierarchy, with a small number of paid employees at the top. Each level is responsible for auditing the levels under them.

    > What real agency does the system you propose offer?
The ability for millions of users to moderate themselves. So... fast response time, by opinionated, emotionally-invested moderators, as opposed to the status quo: slow response time by paid burn-outs following a flow-chart.

    > if your system requires users to view beheading videos regularly
I'm pretty sure that content would be reported faster than anything else. To be fair, another part of the issue is ban-evasion using multiple accounts, and that indeed requires additional measures to handle. Sadly, there's a disincentive to dealing with fake accounts, because trolls count as "sign-ups" too.

    > people will just migrate to a site that doesn't require that.
Like Youtube and Facebook still occassionally do. Well, most users haven't abandoned them yet, so there goes that theory :)
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