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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

#91

One of few fields where AI is very welcome

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

Not if we retain control and each deploy our own moderation individually, relying on trust networks to pre-filter. That probably won't be allowed to happen, but in a rational, non-authoritarian world, this is something that machine learning can help with.

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

#92

I'm curious about the contents that these people moderated. What is it that seeing it fucks people up?

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.

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

#93

[flagged]

You think people who took these jobs had a list of job offers and were jumping for joy to be able to pick this one out? Or that they stuck with it after the first 5 minutes of moderating necrophilia because they believed other jobs would have similar downsides? You’re so out of touch with the real world and hardships people face trying to make a living for themselves and their family.

I’m curious of other perspectives and conclusions on this.

Why do you think Facebook is the responsible party and not the purveyors of the content that caused them PTSD? From my perspective, Facebook hired people to prevent this content from reaching a wider audience. Thanks for any insight you can provide.

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

#94
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And introduces avenues for state actors to force the scanning of other material. This was also during a time where Apple hadn’t pushed out e2ee for iCloud, so it didn’t even make sense.

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 unique. Of the 49.5 million videos reported by ESPs, 11.2 million (23%) were unique."

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

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that we're particularly fragile, given the kind of physical trauma human beings can survive and recover from. It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at makin…

Watch how a group of wild dogs kill their prey, then realise that for milenia human like apes were part of their diet. Even the modern battlefield is more humane than the African savannah.

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

#98
post #83
post #18

Perhaps if looking at pictures of disturbing things on the internet gives you PTSD than this isn’t the kind of job for you? Not everyone can be a forensic investigator or coroner, too. 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.

[flagged]

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

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

#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 if the PTSD-causing material was published by its authors on the authors' own websites, the audience would be small, not suitable for advertising. A return to less centralised web publishing would perhaps be bad for the so-called "ad ecosystem" created by so-called "tech" company intermediaries. To be sure, it would also mean no one in Kenya would be intentionally be subjected to PTSD-causing material in the name of fulfilling the so-called "tech" industry's only viable "business model": surveillance, data collection and online ad services.

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

#100
post #85
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re very wrong, it can be caused by different things to different people- as the causes are emotional it requires severe emotional trauma, which does not have to happen through a specific category of event- a lot of different types of trauma and abuse can cause it. It’s hard to imagine a more disgusting thought process than someone trying to gatekeep others suffering like you are doing here.

actually, not everybody gets PTSD in for example a combat situation, and Gabor Mate says that people who do develop PTSD are the people who have already suffered traumas as children; in a sense, childhood trauma is a preexisting condition.

A lot of PTSD is also not from combat all all- childhood emotional trauma alone can cause it. This is recognized now, but it took a while because initially it was discovered in war veterans and categorically excluded other groups- eventually they discovered that war wasn’t unique in causing the condition.

However, I would point out that Mates’ views are controversial, and don’t fully agree with other research on trauma and PTSD. He unrealistically associates essentially all mental illness and neurodivergence with childhood trauma, even in cases where good evidence contradicts that view. He claims ADHD is caused by childhood emotional trauma, although that is proven not to be the case, so I don’t put much stock in his scientific reasoning abilities- he has his hammer and sees everything as a nail.

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