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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

#391

Post by mrweasel »

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

I imagine that they have a system that is somewhere between shitty and none functional. This is the company that will more often than not flag marketplace posts as "Selling animal", either completely at random or because the pretty obvious "from an animal free home" phrase is used.

If they can't get this basic text parsing correct, how can you expect them to correctly flag images with any real sense of accuracy?

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

#393

Post by kdmtctl »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #336

When people are protected from the horrors of the world they tend to develop luxury beliefs which leads them to create more suffering in the world.

Just scrolled a lot to find this. And I do believe that moderators in a not so safe country seen a lot in their lives. But this also should make them less vulnerable for this kind of exposures and looks like it is not.

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

#394

Post by keybored »

portaouflop wrote: post #385
keybored wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... okay. Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.

Car “accidents” are also completely unnecessary. Even the wording is wrong - those aren’t accidents, it is something we accept as byproduct of a car-centric culture. People feel it is acceptable that thousands of people die on the road so we can go places faster. Similarly they feel it’s acceptable to traumatise some foreigners to keep social media running.

Nitpick that irrelevant example if you want.

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

#395

Post by keybored »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #311
noduerme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching someone you love die of cancer is also super damaging to one's concept of normal life. Getting a diagnosis, or being in a bad car accident, or the victim of a violent assault is, too. I think a personal sense of normality is nothing more than the state of mind where we can blissfully (and temporarily) forget about our own mortality. Obviously, marinating yourself in all the horrible stuff makes it really har…

Actually reckoning with this stuff leads people into believing in anti-natalism, negative utilitarinism, Scopenhaur/Philipp Mainlander (Mainlander btw was not just pro-suicide, he actually killed himself!), and the voluntary extinction movement. This terrified other philosophers like Nietzsche, who spends most of his work defending reality even if it's absolute shit. "Amor Fati", "Infinite Regress/Eternal Recurrence"…

Interesting to see this perspective here. You’re not wrong.

> There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions

The two largest Vedic religions both have hundreds of millions of followers. Is Jainism that different from them in this regard? I know Jainism is very pacifist but on the question of suffering.

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

#396

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

Some products have factories in multiple countries. For example, Teslas are produced in both US and China. The cars produced in both countries are more or less identical in quality. But do you ever see that the market price of the product is different depending on the country of manufacture?

If the moderators in Kenya are providing the same quality labor as those from the US, why the difference in price of their labor?

I have a friend who worked for FAANG and had to temporarily move from US to Canada due to visa issues, while continuing to work for the same team. They were paid less in Canada. There is no justification for this except that the company has price setting power and uses it to exploit the sellers of labor.

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

#397

Post by quesomaster9000 »

The Kenyan moderators' PTSD reveals the fundamental paradox of content moderation: we've created an enterprise-grade trauma processing system that requires concentrated psychological harm to function, then act surprised when it causes trauma. The knee-jerk reaction of suggesting AI as the solution is, IMO, just wishful thinking - it's trying to technologically optimize away the inherent contradiction of bureaucratized thought control. The human cost isn't a bug that better process or technology can fix - it's the inevitable result of trying to impose pre-internet regulatory frameworks on post-internet human communication that large segments of the population may simply be incompatible with.

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

#398

Post by s1artibartfast »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #389
s1artibartfast wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with growth through realism, but people often have the means and ability to protect themselves from these horrors. Im not sure you can systemically prevent this without resorting to big brother shoving propaganda in front of people and forcing them to consume it.

I don't think it needs to be forced, just don't censor so much.

Isn't that forcing? Who decides how much censorship people can voluntarily opt into?

If given control, I think many/most people would opt into a significant amount of censorship.

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

#399

Post by azinman2 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #396
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…

Some products have factories in multiple countries. For example, Teslas are produced in both US and China. The cars produced in both countries are more or less identical in quality. But do you ever see that the market price of the product is different depending on the country of manufacture? If the moderators in Kenya are providing the same quality labor as those from the US, why the difference in price of their labo…

A million things factor into market dynamics. I don’t know why this is such a shocking or foreign concept. Why is a waitress in Alabama paid less than in San Francisco for the same work? It’s a silly question because the answers are both obvious and complex.
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