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More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

theguardian.com

211–220 of 500 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without any option to appeal. Why would that be? Currently content is flagged and moderators decide whether to take it down. Using AI, it's easy conceive a process where some uploaded content is preflagged requiring an appeal (otherwise it's the same as before, a pair of human eyes automatically looking at uploaded material). Uploaders trying to publish rule-breaking content would not bother with an appeal that wou…

Because edge cases exist, and it isn't worth it for a company to hire enough staff to deal with them when one user with a problem, even if that problem is highly impactful to their life, just doesn't matter when the user is effectively the product and not the customer. Once the AI works well enough, the staff is gone and the cases where someone's business or reputation gets destroyed because there are no ways to appe…

> because there are no ways to appeal

I already addressed this and you're talking over it. Why are you making the assumption that AI == no appeal and zero staff? That makes zero sense, one has nothing to do with the other. The human element comes in for appeal process.

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

#212
post #56
post #5

If I was a tech billionaire, and there was so much uploading of stuff so bad, that it was giving my employee/contractors PTSD, I think I'd find a way to stop the perpetrators. (I'm not saying that I'd assemble a high-speed yacht full of commandos, who travel around the world, righting wrongs when no one else can. Though that would be more compelling content than most streaming video episodes right now. So you could o…

If you were a tech billionaire you'd be a sociopath like the others and wouldn't give a single f about this. You'd be going on podcasts to tell the world that markets will fix everything if given the chance.

They are not wrong. Do you know any mechanism other than markets that work at scale and that don’t cost a bomb and don’t involve abusive central authority?

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

#213

> The moderators from Kenya and other African countries were tasked from 2019 to 2023 with checking posts emanating from Africa and in their own languages but were paid eight times less than their counterparts in the US, according to the claim documents Why would pay in different countries be equivalent? Pretty sure FB doesn’t even pay the same to their engineers depending on where in the US they are, let alone which…

> Why would pay in different countries be equivalent?

Because it's exploitative otherwise. It's just exploiting the fact that they're imprisoned within borders.

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

#214
post #44
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge gap between "we will scan our servers for illegal content" and "your device will scan your photos for illegal content" no matter the context. The latter makes the user's device disloyal to its owner.

The choice was between "we will upload your pictures unencrypted and do with them as we like, including scan them for CSAM" vs. "we will upload your pictures encrypted and keep them encrypted, but will make sure beforehand on your device only that there's no known CSAM among it".

> we will upload your pictures unencrypted and do with them as we like

Curious, I did not realize Apple sent themselves a copy of all my data, even if I have no cloud account and don't share or upload anything. Is that true?

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

#215
I'm wondering if there are precedents in other domains. There are other jobs where you do see disturbing things as part of your duty. E.g. doctors, cops, first responders, prison guards and so on...

What makes moderation different? and how should it be handled so that it reduces harm and risks? surely banning social media or not moderating content aren't options. AI helps to some extent but doesn't solve the issue entirely.

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

#216

I'm wondering if there are precedents in other domains. There are other jobs where you do see disturbing things as part of your duty. E.g. doctors, cops, first responders, prison guards and so on... What makes moderation different? and how should it be handled so that it reduces harm and risks? surely banning social media or not moderating content aren't options. AI helps to some extent but doesn't solve the issue en…

From those I know that worked in the industry, contractor systems are frequently abused to avoid providing the right level of counseling/support to moderators.

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

#217

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…

I'm no longer interested in getting a motorcycle, for similar reasons.

You’re only about 20x as likely to die on a motorcycle as in a car.

What can I say? People like to live dangerously.

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

#218

I'm wondering if there are precedents in other domains. There are other jobs where you do see disturbing things as part of your duty. E.g. doctors, cops, first responders, prison guards and so on... What makes moderation different? and how should it be handled so that it reduces harm and risks? surely banning social media or not moderating content aren't options. AI helps to some extent but doesn't solve the issue en…

I don’t have any experience with this, so take this with a pinch of salt.

What seems novel about moderation is the frequency that you confront disturbing things. I imagine companies like Meta have such good automated moderation that what remains to be viewed by a human is practically a firehose of almost certainly disturbing shit. And as soon as you’re done with one post, the next is right there. I doubt moderators spend more than 30 seconds on the average image, which is an awful lot of stuff to see in one day.

A doctor just isn’t exposed to that sort of imagery at the same rate.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't want to eat a cockroach regardless of whether I saw it being prepared or not. The point I am making is that 'feeling sick' and not wanting to eat something isn't about being disconnected from the food. Few people would care if you cut off a piece of steak from a hanging slab and grilled it in front of them, but would find it gross to pick up all the little pieces of gristle and organ meat that fell onto th…

> Few people would care if you cut off a piece of steak from a hanging slab The analogy here would be watching a live cow get slaughtered and then butchered from scratch in front of you, which I think most Western audiences (more than a few) might not like.

Most audiences wouldn’t like freshly butchered cow - freshly butchered meat is tough and not very flavorful, it needs to be aged to allow it to tenderize and develop.

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

#220
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was the FP risk. Everything was on device. People designed images that were FPs of real images.

FP? Let us know what this means when you have a chance. Federal Prosecution? Fake Porn? Fictional Pictures?

My guess is False Positive. Weird abbreviation to use though.
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