The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook
wsj.com
wsj.com
“I was watching the content of deranged psychos in the woods somewhere who don’t have a conscience for the texture or feel of human connection,”
"...If the managers noticed a few minutes of inactivity, they would ping him on workplace messaging tool Slack to ask why he wasn’t working."
The texture of human connection is severely diminished when you are managing what is essentially a drip-fed trauma survivor remotely using a metric of trauma exposure per minute.
> Whisper no longer employs U.S.-based moderators. It uses a team in the Philippines along with machine-learning technology.
Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers.
The underlying issue is seeing content moderation purely as cost that should be minimized. Taking YouTube Kids for example I'm sure you could sell parents products based around moderated content that educates their children, supports their morals and beliefs etc. i.e. find ways to generate enough income with moderated content to treat people fairly.
Are you saying such workers are better off without these jobs?
Other big problem with this is the lack of cultural background for doing this.
Only if you belong to a given culture you can understand the subtleties and the cultural tolerance according to each culture.
This is one of the things that should make us think, about how bad is the situation of centralized social networks, when the values of one culture can be arbitrarily imposed into another.
People and cultures in general should have the right to organize according to their own cultural values. So the only right way to do this, at least if its a centrally managed network, is to have native people doing this for each country they have presence for.
If this is too expensive to do it in the beggining .. maybe hire not just cheaper labor, but from countries (cultures) that have good sensibility about foreign cultures, and select the people with talent to understand cultural nuances.
I feel particularlt outraged when according to a given foreign culture, one thing that locally is not a big deal, get censured, and then you think how close we are to the big brother (by the way theres a certain country already going through this path).
But in the western hemisphere, if nothing change, we are slowly consolidating a regime of digital feudalism were corporations are free to dictate rules for our lives.
My Facebook feed about a year ago, when i last opened facebook was filled with the same memes and "inspirational messages" shoved down by a handful of pages being shared by dumb idiots. I had to search and go directly to a person's profile to see what they were up to.
The real problem is that Facebook started behaving like a TV channel that a social network.
If Facebook goes to only keeping profiles of real persons and removes any and all of these pages and blogs and news agencies and the lot, a lot of its woes with regard to content will be solved.
These pages give a sense of anonymity to the people behind them. Take that anonymity away. Once you know that your personal image will be directly tied to whatever you post and held responsible by everyone in your friend list, you will begin to curb your tendencies in public.
Regardless of what Zuckerberg claims to believe, in real life I have multiple "profiles". For example, I don't debate Java programming with my family members, I don't debate politics or religion (or generally any opinions, because no one knows what will become a hot political topic tomorrow) with my colleagues, etc.
Similarly, I have different rules for reading stuff. I hate memes, but if my cousins post some, I am not going to block them like I would most other people; I will just sigh and scroll down. More importantly, I do not want to read stuff from all my social circles at the same times; sometimes I am in a mood for family stuff, sometimes programming, sometimes other things.
Even better would be to have advanced tools (but with simple user interface) to specify what I want to read; e.g. "what my cousin wrote, but not what someone else wrote and my cousin shared"; to filter posts containing certain words, etc.
Merely removing anonymity will simply divide users into two groups: those who care about not getting fired tomorrow so they only post completely unobjectionable politically correct vanilla stuff, or those who are not very smart or young and inexperienced or too rich to care about what other people think, so they post anything that comes to their minds.
I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out.
8k post in a day is just too many for one person. Its not about how much work they are doing, its about the content they are subjected to look at and review. To do that you have to actually think about it and make a decision -- and that takes a toll on people -- you don't get to forget.
I am not one for regulation but if there is on place in tech that should be considered for regulation, then I think this is a good place to start.
These workers need paid more, access to therapy and much more time off. I also think there are technical solutions to help ease the work needed, but that cost, and nobody seems to want to pay with human workers left holding the bag. This would also include stricter rules to make filtering easier.
Good job, you guys can put a dancing hotdog on the screen why not use that talent to work and make back-end systems to automate this sort of horrid work away. I know it will be hard, but if NN and deep learning is all cracked up to what keeps being preached then it should be within the realm of possible.
Also, while with the when it comes to the law, I am for the notion that it is okay if 10 bad people get away if it means not falsely convicting 1 good person. However on the internet with regards to what normally amounts to pointless shit that people post on the internet. I am okay with 100 good post being automatically removed it if means 1 bad post is also removed.
Why? Posts on the internet are pure data. I'm okay with no posts ever being removed.
IRL analogy: the dog shit that my neighbor throws onto the sidewalk is pure matter. Just atoms and molecules and such. Should it not be removed?
EDIT: Not that I agree with the 100 sacrificial removals for each good one. I don't. But the "pure data" argument doesn't work for me.
Would you remove child porn off the internet? How about a rape victim’s photos and videos? If you could delete something that would cause people to commit suicide, would you?
The platforms are in a tricky position, but I agree this job should pay more with perhaps some regulatory oversight.
If you don't like Internet then just get off it!
You probably never noticed, but some people have this thing called self-actualization. By removing good posts you step on it with your greasy foot. By removing controversial posts you also step on it. That's a lot of damage that you did to innocent people right here.
We've got to get off HTTP just that people like you never have the chance to step into other people's homes, decide what they can and can't post and view.
We're talkng about images of children being raped.
We're not talking about "controversial posts" here. It's perfectly legal to be a Nazi, even if Facebook might prefer you not be a Nazi on their platform.
This is about child abuse material. In no way is that being illegal "controversial".
Seems like the bulk of these roles are contract. "$24/hour" was mentioned in the article. Probably no health benefits. Probably no counseling.
251 working days * 8 hours * $24 = $48,192. Less taxes. Less sick days. Safe to assume these workers aren't all going to work out of the main office in SF.
Seems like Facebook would have to set up some sort of work from home system, like people who transcribe medical records, or some sort of off-shore system, to make this work for workers. But... spreading out the people who do this work is likely to increase security risks that sensitive data will be shared, and reduce workers ability to find comfort with peers.
No way to look at this where automation isn't going to be better.
Unionization would likely be difficult though due to the low barrier of entry for the job - artificial barriers would have to be created by the union and those break down pretty easily due to human factors (see Walmart).
I'm all for regulation in this case. Require that folks who review content for illegal posts be limited in the amount of content they review in a weekday, must have certain benefits like mental health counseling, and get some vacation / sabbatical from the work.
Risks might be reduced innovation in the field, but the big boys like Facebook and Google have already found excellent ways to snuff out their competition within the existing market.
The police normally rotate staff on and off the analyst post every few months.
I was speaking to a detective, saying I was interested in going into digital forensics, and he just plainly said "no, you don't want to do that". He said he knew he'd spent too long on the job when he was walking through a park, saw a father playing with his daughter, and instead of thinking "aww" thought "you sick fucker".
I have, in the course of my career, come across child abuse content. Personally it didn't really bother me - I just didn't think about it and got on with the job of notifying the police, but I can easily see how being exposed to that sort of thing day in day out would really mess with someone's head.
That interview was haunting. I can't imagine how hard it must be, or what kind of toll it takes on you, even if you're able to rotate through to something less stressful after a short period of time.
If you'd like to experience this, you can make an experiment yourself. If you're a Twitter/Facebook user, look for a group/account you know will have unacceptable content (it's easy, search for white genocide or similar - there's always something available). Then try to find some things that are actually reportable without the need to explain the reason in more than a few words.
After you find 10, you'll likely find it's mentally exhausting to deal with it / look at that content anymore. On the up side, you'll likely report and remove some amounts.
The interesting thing is that instead of trying to prosecute the criminals behind this content we would rather just censor it so we can pretend it doesn't exist.
Why would online be different suddenly? Analogues of all the above are needed online too. And somebody who has no other option will be unfortunate enough to fill these roles.
Because you don't have to look at anything you don't want. Because it's not bounded by physical space limitations, so everyone can have as much "space" as they want. Because you can travel from any point to any other point almost instantaneously. Because you can be in as many different places simultaneously as you have the capacity to keep track of. Because you can come and go as you please without anyone else even knowing.
The internet is nothing like the physical world.
The article implies that they are forcing moderators to view the content at a high clip. Why, so as to get false positives back online as quickly as possible? Maybe moderators should only review content that reaches a certain threshold of complaint, and other content is left as is?
I'm not sure how that would work for facebook.
Anecdotally, I know someone who was interested in one of those topics (zoophilia), who thought the subreddit in question was “a dumpster fire” yet was still upset about it being banned.
I never looked at the content itself. Just the seeing the URLs was corrosive enough.
Also interesting, they already have an API for doing this sort of classification: https://perspectiveapi.com/
This experience is one of the main drivers that pushes our team to develop an open, nonprofit conversation platform on which harrassment is difficult by design.
www.hellolyra.com/introduction
Butters had to see every depraved thing. And he ended up trying to kill himself.
And in the end, when he almost died, they blamed him for failing to be the perfect filter.
Its 1984 all over.
Im not an anarchist however, if something is illegal then go ahead and cut it but, censoring without a legal cause is a crime.
If you want to collect pictures of horrible crap and start a website, as long as it's not illegal you can host it on your own.