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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

#301

Post by tossandthrow »

sd9 wrote: post #218
yodsanklai wrote: post #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 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 s…

> 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.

On the contrary I would expect that it would be the edge cases that they were shown - why loop in a content moderator if you an be sure that it is prohibited ont he platform without exposing a content moderator?

In this light, it might make sense why they sue: They are there more as a political org so that facebook can say: "We employ 140 moderators in Kenya alone!" while they do indifferent work that facebook already can filter out.

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

#302

Post by com2kid »

newsclues wrote: post #204
paulryanrogers wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling an army of rock swingers is a lot more work than giving one person an AK47 (when all who would oppose them have rocks). (Thankfully in the US we worship the 2A and its most twisted interpretation. So our toddlers do shooter drills. /s)

You are discounting the complexity of the logistics required for an AK47 army. You need ammo, spare parts, lubricant and cleaning tools. You need a factory to build the weapon, and churn out ammunition. Or, gather a group of people, tell them to find a rock, and go bash the other sides head.

> You need ammo, spare parts, lubricant and cleaning tools.

The ak-47 famously only needs the first item in that list.

That being the key to its popularity.

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

#303

Post by toomanyrichies »

One terrible aspect of online content moderation is that, no matter how good AI gets and no matter how much of this work we can dump in its lap, to a certain extent there will always need to be a "human in the loop".

The sociopaths of the world will forever be coming up with new and god-awful types of content to post online, which current AI moderators haven't encountered before and which therefore won't know how to classify. It will therefore be up to humans to label that content in order to train the models to handle that new content, meaning humans will have to view it (and suffer the consequences, such as PTSD). The alternative, where AI labels these new images and then uses those AI-generated labels to update the model, famously leads to "model collapse" [1].

Short of banning social media at a societal level, or abstaining from it at an individual level, I don't know that there's any good solution to this problem. These poor souls are taking a bullet for the rest of us. God help them.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse

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

#304

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

Eisenstein wrote: post #258
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A cow walks into the kitchen, it gets a captive bolt shoved into its brain with a person holding a compressed air tank. Its hide is ripped off and it is cut into two pieces with all of its guts on the ground and the flesh and bones now hang as slabs. I am asserting that you could do all of that in front of a random assortment of modern Americans, and then cut steaks off of it and grill them and serve them to half of…

> I am asserting that you could do all of that in front of a random assortment of modern Americans, and then cut steaks off of it and grill them and serve them to half of the crowd, and most of those people would not have an problem eating those steaks.

I am asserting that the majority of western audiences, including Americans, would dislike being present for the slaughtering and butchering portion of the experience you describe.

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

#305

Post by unaindz »

caymanjim wrote: post #246
insane_dreamer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least in the US, those jobs - doctors, cops, firefighters, first responders - are well compensated (not sure about prison guards), certainly compared to content moderators who are at the bottom of the totem pole in an org like FB

What does compensation have to do with it? Is someone who stares at thousands of traumatizing, violent images every day going to be less traumatized if they're getting paid more?

At least they can pay for therapy and afford to stop working or find another job

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

#306

Post by Retric »

tossandthrow wrote: post #301
sd9 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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. On the contrary I would expect that it would be the edge cases that they were shown - why loop in a content moderator if you an be sure that it is prohibited ont he platform without exposing a content moderator? In this light, it might make sense…

Even if 1% of images are disturbing that’s multiple per hour, let anyone across months.

US workman’s comp covers PTSD acquired on the job, and these kinds of jobs are rife with it.

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

#307

Post by BoxFour »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #233
yodsanklai wrote: post #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 en…

at least in the US, those jobs - doctors, cops, firefighters, first responders - are well compensated (not sure about prison guards), certainly compared to content moderators who are at the bottom of the totem pole in an org like FB

Shamefully, first responders are not well compensated - usually it's ~$20 an hour.

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

#308

Post by efitz »

I have a lot of questions.

The nature of the job really sucks. This is not unusual; there are lots of sucky jobs. So my concern is really whether the employees were informed what they would be exposed to.

Also I’m wondering why they didn’t just quit. Of course the answer is money, but if they knew what they were getting into (or what they were already into), and chose to continue, why should they be awarded more money?

Finally, if they can’t count on employees in poor countries to self-select out when the job became life-impacting, maybe they should make it a temporary gig, eg only allow people to do it for short periods of time.

My out-of-the-box idea is: maybe companies that need this function could interview with an eye towards selecting psychopaths. This is not a joke; why not select people who are less likely to be emotionally affected? I’m not sure anyone has ever done this before and I also don’t know if such people would be likely to be inspired by the images, which would make this idea a terrible one. My point is find ways to limit the harm that the job causes to people, perhaps by changing how people interact with the job since the nature of the job doesn’t seem likely to change.

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

#309

Post by tyre »

meiraleal wrote: post #232
azinman2 wrote: post #175

> 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? Why 8 times less?

GDP per capita in Kenya is a little less than $2k. In the United States, it’s a bit over $81k.

Median US salary is about $59k. Gross national income (not an identical measure but close) in Kenya about $2.1k.

1/8th is disproportionately in favor of the contractors, relative to market.

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

#310

Post by DaSHacka »

renewiltord wrote: post #264
coryrc wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem when you don't verify the identity of your users and hold them responsible for illegal things. If Facebook verified you were John D SSN 123-45-6789 they could report you for uploading CSAM and otherwise permanently block you from using the site if uploading objectionable material; meaning only exposure to horrific things is only necessary once per banned user. I would expect that to be orders of magnit…

[flagged]

You can thank IRL privacy activists for the lack of cameras in every room in each house; Just imagine how much faster domestic disputes could be resolved!
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