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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

#121

Post by moomin »

croissants wrote: post #107
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #99

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 c…

I mean, the technical expertise thing is solvable, it’s just no-one wants to solve it because SaaS is extremely lucrative."

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

#122

Post by shadowgovt »

llm_trw wrote: post #116
noduerme wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm now old enough to have seen people who treated homosexuals in the 1980s the same we treat pedophiles today start waving rainbow flags and calling the people they beat up for being gay in highschool Nazis. There maybe a few people with principles who stick with them. The majority will happily shove who ever they are told to in a gas chamber.

Wait, why are they calling gay people Nazis? This story is very unclear. And I can't see how it relates to CSAM and the moderators who have to see it, which is a categorically different issue to homosexuality, so different as to be completely unconflatable.

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

#123

Post by doublerabbit »

sneak wrote: post #98
Sharlin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I didn’t make any claims about me. Read it again, more carefully, before making personal attacks.

> Perhaps if looking at pictures of disturbing things on the internet gives you PTSD than this isn’t the kind of job for you?

Perhaps these are jobs people are forced to do because the price of labour isn't as rich as other countries, trafficked and the likes.

> I know lots of people who can and do look at horrible pictures on the internet and have been doing so for 20+ years with no ill effects.

Looking at is different to moderating. I've sen my fair share of snuff from the first iraqi having their head cut off in 2005 all the way down to: ogrish/liveleak, goatse, tubgirl, 2girls1cup shock sites.

But when you are faced with imagery of gruesome material day-in day-out on 12-hour shifts if not longer non-stop, being paid very little, it would take a toll on anyone.

I've done it, lone-wolf sysop for a adult dating website for two years and the stuff I saw was moderate but still made me feel mentally disturbed. The normality wears off very quickly.

Could you work a five days week looking at extreme obscenity imagery for $2 an hour?

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

#124

Post by slothtrop »

sunaookami wrote: post #86
para_parolu wrote: post #7

One of few fields where AI is very welcome

No, this just leads to more censorship without any option to appeal.

> 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 would reject them anyway.

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

#125

Post by shadowgovt »

kotaKat wrote: post #94
shadowgovt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ship has pretty much sailed. If you are storing your data in a large commercial vendor, assume a state actor is scanning it.

I'm shocked at the amount of people I've seen on my local news getting arrested lately for it and it all comes from the same starting tip: "$service_provider sent a tip to NCMEC" or "uploaded a known-to-NCMEC hash", ranging from GMail, Google Drive, iCloud, and a few others. https://www.missingkids.org/cybertiplinedata "In 2023, ESPs submitted 54.8 million images to the CyberTipline of which 22.4 million (41%) were u…

And, indeed, this is why we should not expect the process to stop. Nobody is rallying behind the rights of child abusers and those who traffic in child abuse material. Arguably, nor should they. The slippery slope argument only applies if the slope is slippery.

This is analogous to the police's use of genealogy and DNA data to narrow searches for murderers, who they then collected evidence on by other means. There's is risk there, but (at least in the US) you aren't going to find a lot of supporters of the anonymity of serial killers and child abusers.

There are counter-arguments to be made. Germany is skittish about mass data collection and analysis because of their perception that it enabled the Nazi war machine to micro-target their victims. The US has no such cultural narrative.

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

#126

Post by FireBeyond »

llm_trw wrote: post #25
almog wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

[flagged]

It might have induced 'disgust', but no, two men kissing didn't give 1980s Christian moms actual PTSD.

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

#127

Post by nradov »

narrator wrote: post #66
nappy-doo wrote: post #4

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…

I don't mean to trivialize traumatic experiences but I think many modern people, especially the pampered members of the professional-managerial class, have become too disconnected from reality. Anyone who has hunted or butchered animals is well aware of the fragility of life. This doesn't damage our concept of normal life.

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

#128

Post by throw__away7391 »

krior wrote: post #90
sunaookami wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this just leads to more censorship without any option to appeal.

Curious, do you have a better solution?

The solution to most social media problems in general is:

`select * from posts where author_id in @follow_ids order by date desc`

At least 90% of the ills of social media are caused by using algorithms to prioritize content and determine what you're shown. Before these were introduced, you just wouldn't see these types of things unless you chose to follow someone who chose to post it, and you didn't have people deliberately creating so much garbage trying to game "engagement".

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

#129

Post by sandspar »

dyauspitr wrote: post #92
crystal_revenge wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first paragraph of the article: > post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism. If you want a taste of the legal portion of theses just got to 4chan.org/gif/catalog and look for a "rekt", "war", "gore", or "women hate" thread. Watch every video there for 8-10 hours a day. Now remember this is the legal portion…

As someone that grew up with 4chan I got pretty desensitized to all of the above very quickly. Only thing I couldn’t watch was animal abuse videos. That was all yers ago though, now I’m fully sensitized to all of it again.

The point is that you don't know which one will stick. Even people who are desensitized will remember certain things, a person's facial expression or a certain sound or something like that, and you can't predict which one will stick with you.

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

#130

Post by consumer451 »

nappy-doo wrote: post #4

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.

I have often wondered what would happen if social product orgs required all dev and product team members to temporarily rotate through moderation a couple times a year.
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