Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#581

Post by plankers » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 9:30 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #568

plankers wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can think of a practical way to unionize workers on a 1-2 year contract with a high turnover rate, I'd love to hear it. The deck is stacked against employee organization. If I were conspiracy-minded, I might even say this was by design.

>If you can think of a practical way to unionize workers on a 1-2 year contract with a high turnover rate, I'd love to hear it. Adopt the Danish model, make it mandatory for companies with workforces over a certain size to at least vote on unionisation. Will shift the default from not being unionised to being unionised except for cases were the workforce is actively convinced its detrimental.

I love that idea! But I have a hard time seeing a law like that being passed in the U.S., even in liberal California.

Side thought, things like this help me understand why the Danes are so darn happy.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#582

Post by Macross8299 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:18 AM UTC

hashkb wrote: post #516

Jedi72 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What legislation? Specifically? What do you want to make law, that they have to hire moderators (which they already do?) or do you want to make it illegal to post "bad things" on the internet?

Let me start by saying that I am not running for elected office because it's a really hard job; even though I might believe I would do it with more integrity and rationality than the next person, I'm also smart enough to realize that everyone thinks that way and I'd probably end up within a standard deviation of average corruption. What I'm saying, seriously, is that we need a society-wide blameless post-mortem on so…

>In the meantime, it should be illegal to operate a social network

So what about the countless number of people whose livelihoods depend on social media in some capacity? They're supposed to just be fine with being irrevocably fucked over until the moral panic about social media subsides? (or, in your words, "we decide what is good for us all")

Where does the small business owner who depends on a social network factor in as a "stakeholder"?

Drugs, sugar, cigarettes are measurably and objectively harmful to your health and that's why they are regulated (or should be).

There isn't similar comparable scientific evidence that social media is nearly as harmful except for questionable non-reproducible psychology studies, so I don't think it's comparable at all.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#583

Post by anentropic » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

sounds like the workers need a union

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#584

Post by emn13 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:48 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #446

emn13 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People at 30k are not "dependent" on government subsidies in any socially meaningful sense. They're likely paying more taxes than receiving subsidies - and even if they aren't, there's arbitrariness in that "zero" line in this accounting. E.g. you might call public transit subsidies in cities a subsidy, but... it's a social good, so who exactly is that subsidizing? These kind of workers have next to no leverage, so t…

I know the $30k mark is germane to the original article but I deliberately refrained from putting a quantifiable value on where this "dependency" tipping point may be. For one, I don't know and two, it probably changes with other variables like location, number of dependents etc. In some areas, I imagine $30k is enough to need no assistance while in others life becomes unmanageable without it. I would say that most/a…

> Here's a different take on it: subsidies tend to help both the upper and lower ends of the economic strata. The lower benefits directly and, in cases of business elite, they may benefit from effectively being able to maintain lower wages. So who gets pinched? The middle class, which I think most would feel are necessary for a stable society. Some of our biggest gains as a country came from when the middle class made the largest strides. Not sure I know enough to make that claim, but it's one that's bandied about.

Makes a lot of sense - but like you, not sure whether sense implies truth.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#585

Post by solstice » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 11:16 AM UTC

ngold wrote: post #522

ummwhat wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked about this somewhere else. What you're seeing is just a manifestation of what I call "the fundamental problem of user created content." Said problem is that warehousing and distributing content scales insanely well but curation does not. Until we have strong AI, curation is a manual process. Moderators just aren't efficient enough at processing content for their output to pay for a full time salary. You c…

15 billion dollars in pure profit. You could pay a living wage with health benefits, or you could hire twice as many people and have everyone work less while paying more. This is just Facebook being cheap.

The image of the Chernobyl liquidators just popped into my mind, each worker only allowed to shovel radiative shit for 90 seconds before having a mandatory time out. Treating content moderators in a similar way seems like a step into the right direction from a mental health perspective

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#586

Post by pizza234 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 12:01 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #517

lifeformed wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word is "exploitive". Desperate people will do things because they have to. If I pay a homeless person $20 to humiliate himself, is that a fair transaction, or an exploitation of the asymmetry between our conditions?

There is no obligation for anyone to do anything. Do you assume that there is no free will and we are all like robots driven by short term profits?

That doesn't answer the parent's question.

If you call 20$, for a person who owes nothing and is probably starving, a "short term profit", you've very likely never experienced how is it to live in poor conditions.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#587

Post by Meskupie » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

solstice wrote: post #585

ngold wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 billion dollars in pure profit. You could pay a living wage with health benefits, or you could hire twice as many people and have everyone work less while paying more. This is just Facebook being cheap.

The image of the Chernobyl liquidators just popped into my mind, each worker only allowed to shovel radiative shit for 90 seconds before having a mandatory time out. Treating content moderators in a similar way seems like a step into the right direction from a mental health perspective

The largest impact events will likely be the smaller percentage of posts that really resonate with the moderator. What would be best is the flexibility to take a break after reviewing those level of posts rather than simply periodically.

The most important thing for moderators would be group and individual therapy sessions run at work with hired therapists. Group therapy is great because you can relate to other moderators struggles which helps process, and individual to help process the most traumatic events. This is what Kik has implemented and seems to be effective.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#588

Post by nswest23 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

cldellow wrote: post #12

This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Fac…

for the record the article states that cognizant, the contractor that FB deals w/for content moderation, does provide health benefits:

> Cognizant also offers a 24/7 hotline, full healthcare benefits, and other wellness programs.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#589

Post by prirun » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

The article mentioned that "In May, Facebook announced that it will raise contractor wages by $3 an hour". If Facebook is dictating the wages of content moderators, then it is an employer, and all of these "contractors" should be reclassified as such, with Facebook paying all back wages, benefits, etc.

Here are some other ideas:

Instead of having content moderators watch 200 of these videos per day, distribute the load over the entire Facebook workforce. Or, when a content moderator flags a video for removal, verify that by making a regular Facebook employee watch the video to confirm the removal. This should increase the accuracy rate above the 98% threshold Facebook has set. That should put a finer point on the problem.

I could barely read descriptions of these videos. There's no way I could watch one, let alone 200 a day. This work is like being in a war, and they should be paid like a soldier who is risking their life / mental health.

Re: Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

#590

Post by xamuel » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #557

xamuel wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And then the defense catches on And has to redo everything. It's whack-a-mole. Doesn't have to be powerful actors really, either. There are many less powerful actors who would love to get selected things removed from YouTube. This isn't the same as spam mail filters, because you generally don't know what sort of emails other people are sending each other. If you did, you could deliberately try to manipulate filters…

> If you did, you could deliberately try to manipulate filters to flag your competitors' emails as spam. You could, it's just hard and generally not worth it. The same, I believe, goes for video manipulation. Sounds like hash collisions. Possible, sure, but not something you run on your cell in 30s.

It's eye opening when you realize how cut-throat competition can be when it comes to blackhat SEO etc.

If you've discovered some longtail goldmine and you're the #2 result when people search for it and it's making you money, you have a big incentive to do anything it takes to nuke the #1 result.

And before you say "You'll get caught and banned", obviously you do the nuking with a sockpuppet account. That's blackhat 101.