The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1853804/mass-sh...

I could swear there was also a Christchurch copy-cat attack in Europe, but I can't remember sufficient details about it to find an article. Perhaps that one wasn't streamed on FB.

I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of Facebook atrocities (I closed my account nearly a decade ago), but without vetting content before it goes live, I don't see how they will entirely prevent these videos from reaching some users.

The root of the problem, which is rarely mentioned in these discussions, is that many people enjoying comfortable living conditions believe themselves to be “pure-blooded” and unable to deal with “unclean” things because of the possible “traumas”. (What is an ideal person free of “traumas”, anyway? A vegetable stoned on drugs?) You can easily see here the resemblance of a old time countess complaining about her “nerves” while her serfs do all the dirty work. Is there a natural law that says a poor grunt is bound to clean the junk from what you see on the website? Do it yourself.

The same happens with medical, law enforcement, and other professions. They are considered “special” jobs for “special” people (which is not true, the one who defines it like that is “special”). Then, any worries and doubts are neutralized by convenient “but it's their profession, they chose it, they are paid for it, etc.” This creates a stupid rift between “us” and “them”, and affects how both sides reason about themselves.

The resulting imbalance is routinely abused. Social networks are competing in presenting a rose-colored walled fantasy to their human cattle to increase yield — everyone can see they use “The Matrix” as a business plan. This creates a lot of shitty jobs where people waste their emotional capacity to make others pleased, not unlike in prostitution. On the other hand, media is hooking the softened consumer with the sensationalist outrage bait about maniacs, wars, corruption, presumed orgies, etc. To makes things worse, the limits to all of that are set not by some moral standards or concern about someone's well-being, as it is often implied, but by advertisement contracts. The bureaucratic machine decides what is “suitable” for the visitors. For example, this makes most of the talk around “Free The Nipple” moot: there is no undercover agents of patriarchy to battle, it's advertisers who bring money and judge what is unwanted “sexual content” (some might say it's a perfect example of capitalist oppression — cue “L'Internationale”).

Even this discussion is full of overreacting people. No, the video on your screen is not as “horrible, horrible” as experiencing something firsthand, nor the pain of the tortured can be compared to the pain of the random witnesses on the internet (if we don't count their own wild fantasies). If it happens, then it's no good to pretend it's not. Who knows, it may even make you think. All in all, humans don't show a lot of originality in what they produce, so the number of things you can expect to see is quite limited. I can only conclude by reiterating that knowledge is power, ignorance is bliss, and there's a lot of people who'd like to benefit from others' ignorance in many ways.

What good is chemo if your patients refuse it?

> Reddit: Limit subreddits to 500 participants at most. Eliminate the number next to upvotes.

This doesn't stop people from posting disturbing content, and it destroys reddit's entire model. This solution doesn't work.

> Verify accounts.

In what way? Do you want to abolish anonymity? Because I can tell you right now that most of us aren't interested in such a solution.

> Limit posting.

In what way? Throttling posting speed? Sure if you just lessen the amount of content overall there will also be less disturbing content... but there's still disturbing content that needs to be moderated.

> This is not any feature inherent to the Web, it's a function of sites that purposefully link together and allow people to rapidly post information.

The default state of the internet is publicly viewable information. Thus it's an inherent feature that you can access almost anything out there.

> Pre-social media

As far as I'm aware, there was no such time. There have almost always been bulletin boards, forums, chat rooms, image/file sharing sites, and other forms of social media.

> there will be less content to moderate

Dividing up the content doesn't reduce the amount of it that needs to be moderated any more than cutting a cake reduces the amount of cake.

> Elimination of advertisers and the implementation of cost (as a form of friction), I think, would also go a long way. Cost per post would be ideal.

This just shuts people out according to income bracket. It reduces the total population, but I doubt it helps reduce the fraction of that population that are interested in posting and sharing disturbing content. It's just throwing the baby out with the bath water.