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The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

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Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#131

Post by jcun4128 »

ehnto wrote: post #121

There are some things I will explicitly avoid in projects I'm working on. One of them is allowing picture or video uploads to users if the service is free. There's no low-risk, cost effective solution for moderating it, and in my country we also don't have safe-harbour type laws, so any content on the platform is your responsibility.

I had considered using services like Google Cloud Vision or other services for explicit image detection anyway.

Most websites it seems when you upload an image it's immediately available, I always wonder if it goes through some basic moderation system or just waits to get reported.

I've done tagging jobs on MTurk before it's weird... seeing random people's images.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#132

Post by agentdrtran »

kevinskii wrote: post #130
DavidVoid wrote: post #102

That was good article and I think something really needs to be done to make content moderation more humane. This quote from the article “It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human.” reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1]. Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the…

It would be great if there were a way to make content moderation more humane, but perhaps this is like saying that it would be great if we could make hospital emergency room work more humane. It is unavoidably traumatic, and ER staff are known to detach and use dark humor as a coping mechanism. Content moderation is a similarly noble and difficult profession.

ER staff are paid a lot more, are sometimes even in a union, and also get the benefit of helping people and seeing the effect of their help.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#133

Post by nitwit005 »

msapaydin wrote: post #95

What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?

It has been. Most of these sites catch a ton of images and video automatically when they are similar enough to prior known content.

That doesn't matter from a staff point of view though. You have a queue to work through. You'll be putting in an 8 hour day dealing with the stuff the system doesn't catch. The automation just means they don't need as much staff.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#134

Post by falcrist »

intopieces wrote: post #94

Every time you use Facebook, see an advertisement there, or click it, every time you share content on Facebook and get others to engage with that platform, you are contributing to a platform that is directly responsible for human psychological harm, in many different ways. Same for Twitter, and for Reddit, and Instagram... and probably TikTok. I don’t believe the use of these platforms can be considered ethical.

Does this logic also apply to commenting on hacker news? Or is it specifically the platforms you mentioned?

What specifically is the reason you consider those particular platforms to be unethical, and what is the solution.

It's not enough to say "social media bad". You can say that about anything including the internet as a whole. We need the reasons it's bad and solutions.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#135

Post by Sebb767 »

munificent wrote: post #23
Sebb767 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you crowdsource the moderation task[...]? I highly doubt that. These reported posts might contain private data or highly shocking content; putting that on a public platform, especially associated with the name of Facebook, is very unlikely to happen.

> putting that on a public platform, especially associated with the name of Facebook Is that not what the person who originally posted the content being moderated is doing?

It still would open up a gore/scare platform (think LiveLeak), since only the bad content is reported. Sure, most might be tame, but it wouldn't take long for gore seekers to come.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#136

Post by agentdrtran »

msapaydin wrote: post #95

What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?

It's not automatable at all, for example Facebook's guidelines change by the day and sometimes by the hour, and many cases are not able to be analyzed by machine as the error rate is too high.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#137

Post by fareesh »

Some great undercover video of what goes on at Cognizant here, as far as bias in moderating actions is concerned:

https://www.politicalite.com/latest/facebook-employee-if-som...

In this video it is shown that regarding beheadings, Facebook made it a point to send their moderation contractors a memo that the image that was frequently reported of President Trump's face with a knife at the neck where he is being beheaded was an exception to the content policy on beheadings/violence/incitement because it was considered to be "art" by some museum somewhere in Portland - which from what I can see on TV - appears to be an extremely volatile and violent place in some parts.

There is a reference to a cartoon post of Elmer Fudd shooting a cartoon gun at Beto O'Rourke with the text "I'm here for your guns" at the top - which was not given any similar exception.

I don't think Facebook or their partners are serious about this kind of thing at all since they seem ok with advocating violence and gore when it resonates with some personal opinions.

Also noteworthy is that the name of this whistleblower garners fewer search results on Google, than the name of another whistleblower Eric Ciaramella who, if you uttered a-la Voldemort, would get you banned instantly.

Broadly, content policy at these websites seems to be a lord of the flies, unprincipled hackjob of whatever the political machinery at the organization deems worthy of steering society in the direction of their whims. Given the influence and power of Facebook and other tech platforms, this should worry people. I'm less inclined to be sympathetic to these folks and the difficulty of their jobs, given the apparent willingness to become social constructionists with the power that they wield so irresponsibly.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#138

Post by santigr »

kevinskii wrote: post #130
DavidVoid wrote: post #102

That was good article and I think something really needs to be done to make content moderation more humane. This quote from the article “It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human.” reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1]. Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the…

It would be great if there were a way to make content moderation more humane, but perhaps this is like saying that it would be great if we could make hospital emergency room work more humane. It is unavoidably traumatic, and ER staff are known to detach and use dark humor as a coping mechanism. Content moderation is a similarly noble and difficult profession.

I think the diffrence is that ER personal are prepare for that kind of situations and they more or less know what to expect.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#139

Post by racl101 »

msapaydin wrote: post #95

What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?

Not to mention the fact, that we'd be subjecting AIs to the worse that humanity has to offer. This is the kind of stuff that creates Ultrons or Skynets who decide that humanity is trash and that it ought to be wiped out. Lol.

Re: The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

#140

Post by three_seagrass »

stickfigure wrote: post #126
indigochill wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least in this case people are paid to do this. I've done commercial moderation before and I would sooner go jobless than go back to exposing myself to the kinds of things people have to when doing this professionally. It's the kind of things you wish there was a brain cleaning solution for, but there isn't so it's stuck there basically forever (though I suspect the alcoholism rate is higher among people who have…

This seems like something specific to the individual. Maybe this isn't the job for you, but there's probably enough people "made of different stuff" that could handle it? I feel like there's a subtext in this discussion that "nobody can handle it" or "you have to be a monster to work this job" but that's just not true. Just out of college in the mid-90s, I worked for a few months at a small local software company in…

It doesn't seem to be specific to an individual when there are class actions lawsuits and many people reporting to suffer from it.

There exist jobs, like slaughterhouse knockers, which are linked to causing PTSD and increased criminal behavior. It's not far fetched to believe these moderator jobs do too.

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