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More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

theguardian.com

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Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#101

I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.) I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it." I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.

Yes, these jobs are horrible. However, I do know from accidently encountering bad stuff on the internet that you want to be as far away from a modern battlefield as possible. It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how frag…

One does not fully-experience life until you encounter a death of something you care about. It being a pet, person; nothing gives you that real sense of reality until your true feelings are challenged.

I used to live in the Disney headspace until my dog had to be put down. Now with my parents being in their seventies, and me in my thirties I fear losing them the most as the feeling of losing my dog was hard enough.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#103
post #15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe.. apple had a lot of backlash using AI to detect CSAM.

No, they had backlash against using AI on devices they don’t own to report said devices to police for having illegal files on them. There was no technical measure to ensure that the devices being searched were only being searched for CSAM, as the system can be used to search for any type of images chosen by Apple or the state. (Also, with the advent of GenAI, CSAM has been redefined to include generated imagery that…

Weird take. The point of on-device scanning is to enable E2EE while still mitigating CSAM.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#104
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these jobs are horrible. However, I do know from accidently encountering bad stuff on the internet that you want to be as far away from a modern battlefield as possible. It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how frag…

It's not that we're particularly fragile, given the kind of physical trauma human beings can survive and recover from. It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at makin…

Humans can render other humans unrecognizable with a rock.

Brutal murder is low tech.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#105
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're lying and you know it. I remember the 80s as much as anyone else. Especially the part where Elton John and Freddy Mercury where at the peak of their popularity, unless you where living in a religious shithole but that was (and still is) a small part of the world.

In 1980 75% of adults thought that homosexuality was always wrong and 20% that it was never wrong or only sometimes wrong. https://lgbpsychology.org/html/gss4.html https://lgbpsychology.org/html/prej_prev.html Your feelings about the period mean nothing.

Seeing something you think is culturally wrong is not necessarily traumatizing, is it? And surely there are degrees of "wrongness", ranging from the merely uncomfortable to the truly gross to the utterly horrifying. Even within the horrifying category, one can differentiate between things like a finger being chopped off and e.g. disembowelment. It's reasonable to expect a person would be more traumatized the further up the ladder of horror they're forced to look.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#106
post #42

Worked at PornHub's parent company for a bit and the moderation floor had a noticeable depressive vibe. Huge turnover. Can't imagine what these people were subjected to.

You don't mention the year(s), but I recently listened to Jordan Peterson's podcast episode 503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait. I will go ahead and assume that on the wild/carefree time of PornHub, when anyone could be able to upload anything and everything, from what that lady said, the numbers of pedophilia videos, bestiality, etc. was rampant.

[flagged]

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#107

Perhaps this is what happens when someone creates a mega-sized website comprising hundreds of millions of pages using other peoples' submitted material, effectively creating a website that is too large to "moderate". By letting the public publish their material on someone else's mega-sized website instead of hosting their own, perhaps it concentrates the web audience to make it more suitable for advertising. Perhaps…

A return to less centralized web publishing would also be bad for the many creators who lack the technical expertise or interest to jump through all the hoops required for building and hosting your own website. Maybe this seems like a pretty small friction to the median HN user, but I don't think it's true for creators in general, as evidenced by the enormous increase in both the number and sophistication of online creators over the past couple of decades.

Is that increase worth traumatizing moderators? I have no idea. But I frequently see this sentiment on HN about the old internet being better, framed as criticism of big internet companies, when it really seems to be at least in part criticism of how the median internet user has changed -- and the solution, coincidentally, would at least partially reverse that change.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#109

I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.) I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it." I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.

Earlier this year, I was at ground zero of the Super Bowl parade shooting. I didn’t ever dream about it, but I spent the following 3-4 days constantly replaying it in my head in my waking hours.

Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods.

Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason.

I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.

Re: More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

#110
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, this is dangerously close to asserting "people are only outraged about CSAM because they're told to be." I don't think that's what you mean.

It is exactly what I mean. If you don't nurture that outrage every day than you'd be rather surprised what can happen to a culture in a single generation.

I think your logic is backwards. The main reason for a culture to ban pedophilia is because it causes trauma in children. For thousands of years, cultures have progressed towards protecting children. This came from a natural sense of outrage in a majority of people, which became part of the culture. Not vice versa. In many of your comments, you seem to assume that people are only automatons who think and do exactly what their culture teaches them, but that's not the truth. The culture is made up of individuals, and individual conscience frequently - thankfully - overrides cultural diktat. Otherwise no dictatorship would ever fall, no group of people would ever be freed, and no wicked practices would ever be stamped out. It has always been individual people acting against the culture whose outrage has caused the culture to change. Which strongly implies that people's sense of outrage is at least partly intrinsic to human nature, totally apart from cultural practices of the time.
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