401–410 of 500 posts
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GP didn't talk about killing
Render unrecognizable? Yeah, I guess that could be survivable, but it's definitely lethal intent.
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…
A content moderator for Facebook will invariably see more depravity and more frequently than a doctor or police officer. And likely see far less support provided by their employers to emotionally deal with it too.
This results in a circumstance where employees don’t have the time nor the tools to process.
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"More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism." What part here are you suggesting is similar to seeing two men kissing?
Not defending this person in particular, but you should take a look at how anti-LGBT, including at the government level, most countries are in Africa. Maybe a decent number of them do regard seeing homosexuality as PTSD inducing. There are several places where they legally can and will kill you for homosexuality.
Their line of logic was that our society moral values are but social construct, that change from place to place and with time, therefore being exposed to sexual violence, child abuse, gore etc. is PTSD inducing only because we're examining it through our limited perspective whereas it's quite possible that all these things those FB mods were exposed to can be perfectly normal in some cultures.
I wanted to see where that argument would lead them to, as in, what kind of people would FB should have hired that would be resistant to all these horrible stuff, but other than to let me know that in fact there are such cultures, I never got a straight answer out of them.
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…
Being a doctor and helping people through horrific things is unlike helplessly watching them happen.
IIRC, PTSD is far more common among people with sleep disorders, and it’s believed that the lack of good sleep is preventing upsetting memories from being processed.
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> 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…
> 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. Why assume they're just token diversity hires who don't do useful work..? Have you ever built an automated content moderation system before? Let me tell you something about them if not: no matter how good your automated moderation tool, it i…
I am also not saying that content moderation should catch everything.
What I am saying is that the content moderation teams should ideally decide on the edge cases as they are hard for automated system.
In turn that also means that these people ought not to be exposed to too hardcore material - as that is easier to classify.
Lastly I say that if that is not the case - then they are probably not there to carry out a function but to fill a political role.
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A friend's friend is a paramedic and as far as I remember they can take the rest of a day off after witnessing death on duty and there's an obligatory consulation with a mental healthcare specialist. From reading the article, it seems like those moderators are seeing horrific things almost constantly throughout the day.
I've never heard of a policy like that for physicians and doubt it's common for paramedics. I work in an ICU and a typical day involves a death or resuscitation. We would run out of staff with that policy.
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 bureaucratize…
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.
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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"…
EDIT: If you’re interested what actually happened is that I was missing the prerequisite early childhood experience that enables one to feel secure in reality. If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so. For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke
https://apnews.com/article/kenya-facebook-content-moderation... - Facebook content moderators in Kenya call the work 'torture.' Their lawsuit may ripple worldwide
I found this one while looking for salary information on these Kenyan moderators. This article mentioned that they are being paid $429 per month.