Facebook not protecting content moderators from mental trauma: lawsuit
reuters.com
reuters.com
This feels like a class action lawsuit brought by garbage workers because they have to handle trash all day long.
I'd bet facebook could afford it.
Also, it seems like having a 3 strikes policy on accounts that post this stuff would be a good idea, too. Protect workers by ensuring that they're not moderating one angry nazi that gets every other post flagged. (maybe they already do this?)
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These are called emotional support animals, and they are totally a legit strategy for helping people cope with emotional trauma.
Knowing someone who used to work on their moderation/graph integrity team, whatever they're doing, it's not enough.
If the firehose of internet garbage can't be safely handled it's time to get rid of it. We've banned dangerous chemicals. Time to restrict Facebook, if it is a health hazard to its workers.
Of course, that would require Facebook to spend money, and add headcount.
And we know that they only hired these people as a Public Relations exercise.
This is why Dribbble is still nice and most other places turn to garbage.
HN is a rare exception. It's likely because the subject matter requires a certain degree of intelligence, which tends to negatively correlate with trashiness.
I think you're confusing "more homogeneous" with "less trashy".
Trashy is just whatever the local minority does that the local majority finds repulsive.
A lot of the opinions conveyed in the commentary on HN that are reasonably well accepted would go over like a lead balloon in some other communities.
Those aren't "shitty users" those are vile and criminal people doing extremely horrible things and sharing them. Most or many of those people should be, where possible, referred to local authorities for judicial processing. FB can very well ID these offenders. It's not like they don't collect enough information to know who they are.
Interesting. Like a regular meatspace party. Gmail used it and I got the feeling of them using it as social network tracking, so I wrote it off. But this is a great application. Will have to check out Dribble if anyone will invite me on ;).
It's hard to combat someone willing to set up thousands of accounts to get their message out, especially since some portion of those will be "good" accounts designed to make the system look bad if they get banned.
It's one thing to look at naked selfies or bad taste political jokes.
It's another thing altogether to look at rape, pedophilia and dismemberment. Hell, sometimes it's mix of those three in the same photo or video.
The responsibility falls on the employer to provide adequate support.
Another thing they could possibly do is to include fictional content in the bulk, so that the moderators could at some level believe no real person went through that.
It is unrealistic to expect any normal person to have a grasp on what adverse effect will have on their mental health over time. You can walk away from being a garbage worker, but you can't unsee disturbing imagery.
The moderators are sadly enough going to become experts on this stuff in a hurry, it's not likely that you'll be able to fool them anyway.
You don’t get to disregard putting your employees in physical or psychological danger just because you pay them money.
> This feels like a class action lawsuit brought by garbage workers because they have to handle trash all day long.
Yes. Why are people creating jobs in the first place that obviously suck? It would be far better if they worked 10% on these disturbing images and 90% on something different, like software QA for instance.
I don't want to deep dive into political theory but the mere existence of people whose only job is to dispose garbage or clean toilets makes very little sense, is highly unfair and hardly works. It would be much better if people "cleaned their own sh."
I'm not saying that I would pay $125/hour for a janitor. I'm saying that people who bring in dirt should every once in a while clean it themselves. Like in a flat share but scaled up. Decentralised somehow.
> Because that is what you get have brain surgeons cleaning toliets.
I guess I'm fine with Brain surgeons getting tumor's out of people's brains. Their job is quite exceptional.
> It works perfectly well even if the job is less than desirable.
It does not. People who work these jobs and work in overly dense areas like SV or NY cannot afford to live there - except if they live at their parent's...with 50.
This needs to be thought through.
As for things working I believe we are speaking of works in two entirely different ways. Having someone as a dedicated cleaner is perfectly functional even if it is a crappy way to make a living. Call it SBW - sucks but works. As long as there are people willing to work the job it is SBW at worst. If they have people willing to head in then it works.
SV and NYC are both not the densest by a wide margin compared The issue there is a lack of willingness to upgrade transit and housing density sufficient. SV especially.
If workers win: FB puts freeze on hiring moderation staff. PR benefits begin outweighing the labor costs, and there’s not enough moderation capacity to block the vile content from getting through.
If FB wins: Workers develop mental conditions, moderation staff quits from the job stress, and there’s lots of job churn and not enough moderators to fight the problem.
Counselling comes to mind .. in the form of a regular debrief or supervision session
It looks like that's exactly what they do.
e.g. Psychological support could be via a webchat platform.
You'd figure that four years after this article came out the larger social media companies would have solved this issue.
A section that stood out to me:
Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the video that made him quit. He was 24 years old and between jobs in the Bay Area when he got a gig as a moderator for a then-new startup called VideoEgg. Three days in, a video of an apparent beheading came across his queue.
"Oh fuck! I've got a beheading!" he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. "Oh," he said, "which one?" At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. "I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it," says Swearingen, now the social media editor at Atlantic Media.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft...
The ones who are regular users who choose to moderate a community? No. There's no business relationship.
> Facebook in the past has said all of its content reviewers have access to mental health resources, including trained professionals onsite for both individual and group counseling, and they receive full health care benefits.
...which is it?
If i employ you to clean human feces, you can sure me for not providing adequate protection etc but you cant sure me because you had to deal with human feces. That is the job.
It has to be incredibly demoralizing to see yet another child sex slave image posted from that Kremlin IP range taken in what is clearly the same room they've been seeing for months. You can forward all of the pictures to the FBI, but they can't do anything about it and you're seeing victim after victim paraded around the Internet. Facebook's jurisdiction stops at the uplink from their datacenter.
Yes. All those people should have support too. And many more.
What is it with people and saying we need to race to the bottom? Like when people react to other people's high pay and benefits not by saying, "I should be up there with you", but instead, "why aren't you down here with me?"
The implication being, I guess, we need to do more to spread the suffering and not lift people.