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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

It’s strange how quiet the pro-Facebookers become on threads like these. Yesterday, we saw a lot of energy around Libra on both sides of the Facebook spectrum.

I’d love to hear an argument from someone defending this company that isn’t “everybody does it.”

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Sometimes “everybody does it” is the appropriate response. I’m absolutely in favor of Facebook giving everyone more money and better working conditions and generally making their lives a pleasure. But when they sometimes fail to do that, in predictable ways that other companies also fail at, “Facebook specifically is evil and we’ve got to destroy it” is just not a reasonable reaction.

This is an example of default bias. By your logic, one could make the argument that we shouldn't hold the president accountable for lies he tells because it's generally accepted that all politicians lie. Regardless of your political leanings, should that ever, ever be true?

That argument simply doesn't hold up. Calling out specific, concrete bad behavior should never be defended with "everybody does it." Sure, there's argument to be made that seeking to destroy Facebook is an overreaction, but that's different than arguing that everybody does it, which completely excuses that bad behavior.

Every good story needs good villains. And the story of the 21st century is just getting started. We are in that phase of the story where the villains are pupating, given resources, and time to develop their own hyper efficient Amtssprache and narratives of self importance. Sooner or later destiny cannot be escaped and it takes everyone to a point of no return. And then the great war begins and the heroes arrive. The entire cycle would breakdown without good villains.

The Libra discussion was strange, because it was mostly pro-crypto people who didn't grasp how not crypto Libra is, and anti-Facebook people, with a slice of "hey this is probably illegal" people thrown in.

It seems like content moderation is just a crazy wicked problem. And the company is doing the best it can with a lot of constraints. Better communication with the workers sounds like it would help, but what else should they be doing realistically?

> what else should they be doing realistically?

- Pay them better

- Give them proper healthcare

- Don't isolate/silo them

These things would enable them to better deal with the inevitable stress and secondary PTSD that comes with their work. And would help FB perms to observe difficulties and quickly affect change.

Well, they should be elevated above the other departments to handle the obvious security and conflict of interest issues that naturally exist in any company like this. So their salaries should be much higher. And actually, more important than healthcare, which the employee takes advantage of at the employee's own discretion, there should be mandatory mental health counseling and screening. I don't know what the frequency should be, I'm not a clinician. But my layman's guess would be a minimum of 3 times a year for each employee.

But I disagree about siloing them. I mean, I'm sure there are some pretty good security reasons for siloing content moderation off from other parts of the company. Not saying that anyone from FB would necessarily do the following, but imagine an ad sales bonuses start going away because clicks are down. You just can't have ad sales cooperating with content moderation in any way shape or form to get more clickable content through. There should just be a content policy, and content moderation zaps whatever they please. End of story. That's how it should work. If ad sales wants input, they should have to convince legal to change the content policy.

In other words, if this thing were structured correctly, content moderation would be above most everything else. (Everything other than legal.) And completely untouchable via any mechanism other than an official change of the acceptable use and content policies.

Paying them better and taking their working conditions more seriously.

There are serious scalability issues with facebook’s current business model, which inevitably puts workers in a position where they have few rights, low pay, and poor working conditions.

We have to be able to question the viability of a business that treats workers this way. Contracting firms essentially allow companies like FB to completely absolve responsibility for the conditions of these low-paid workers.

They're contracting it out so they can wash their hands, how's that count as "doing the best they can"?

When I started working with Class 3B lasers at my lab, I had to undergo an initial medical exam, and then periodic ones to make sure my eyesight wasn't being affected. Guess what the company should be doing?

I mean, come on. If the article had said there are mandatory mental health screenings, and mandatory transfers if you don’t pass, you know everyone would be pointing to it as another example of how the content moderators are being mistreated.

The idea is that employees would get mandatory mental health care with licensed professionals, and not the 1 counselor that didn't know how to help.

Yeah, I would support transfers to non-moderation tasks if the moderator was psychologically unfit to perform the job, rather than keeping them on and putting more pressure on.

Personally, I skimmed the article and failed to see anything particularly bad about it. Typical unskilled office job, with handpicked horror stories.

As usual, the author manages to make the employer responsible for employee's life situation. But aside from an impulse of assigning blame on the closest most powerful actor related to situation, I don't see any reason to see Facebook in any kind of negative light for this. They need a service performed, they found people who're willing to do that service for the money offered, they gave them this money. They didn't create neither the job situation, neither the lack of education, neither the whole life of choices that lead these people toward this point: they aren't even in a any condition to control the labor market.

And speaking of labor market, I really don't think that they would do anyone a favor if they pay significantly higher than the market going rate. In my experience, such an experiment creates a very unhealthy office politics: people realize that they won't get this kind of compensation anywhere else, and their concern for not getting fired becomes more influential than personal ethics or professionalism.

The distinction between content moderation and other sorts of "unskilled office work" is the distressing nature of the content. My gut feeling is that these aren't "handpicked horror stories" but are instead the core of the job: facing video evidence of the worst aspects of human cruelty for 8 hours a day. Thus, the question raised isn't a simple "shouldn't these employees be treated better?" but something more like "how can we accept the existence of a job like this?"

In my personal opinion, as someone who's moderated online communities before, Facebook needs to accept that any "system of [ethical] rules" is prone to being "lawyered", and ultimately serves to waste the time of content moderators like these. More importantly, few accept such a system of rules as legitimate: any rule set, even if "fair", is going to be judged by its edge cases, e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...

The answer is to deploy an aggressive moderation AI, and tell users "too damn bad" if their post gets deleted (users will protest about "free speech" but that philosophical principle was created in a very different communication environment. If I had to create a new right more suited to the modern day, it'd be a right to "freedom from speech" instead), or else dramatically limit the sphere of content users are exposed to (although that would go against their whole ethos "connecting the world" or whatever).

Facebook is in charge of demanding that these people to re-watch the same gore videos over and over. I'd wager that the vast majority of gore videos uploaded to Facebook can be identified from a few couple keyframes. They shouldn't have to listen to the audio of the video unless absolutely necessary either.

Facebook has actively designed this system that's extremely hostile and damaging towards their moderators and they should absolutely take all blame for the faults in that system.

Clearly you just skimmed.

Or perhaps in your office you deal constantly with anger, perversion, violence and gore?

Where is that office?

> Typical unskilled office job, with handpicked horror stories.

Are you arguing that these stories aren't important because of the relative infrequency with which they occur? An employee died on the job in a brutally high-stress environment, and Cognizant is denying that his death had anything to do with the work he did. You're right in that cases like his are all too typical nowadays. But the fact that you don't "see anything particularly bad about it" says a lot.

> They didn't create neither the job situation, neither the lack of education

They created the jobs, didn't they? Those jobs exist because Facebook exists. How do they not bear responsibility for the conditions of those jobs? And nobody is criticizing FB for the lack of education or life choices of these workers. What do those have to do with this story at all?

> they aren't even in a any condition to control the labor market.

Disagree. They're in a position to constantly threaten thse workers with termination, that's about as close to total control as one can get in the free world. I'd wager that's far more control than your employer exercises with you. Can you imagine what would happen if Facebook tried that tactic with their SWEs? It's unbelievably disgusting that they treat their low skilled workers this way.

> But aside from an impulse of assigning blame on the closest most powerful actor related to situation, I don't see any reason to see Facebook in any kind of negative light for this.

If the company paying the employees isn't responsible for the working conditions of its facilities, then who is? Do companies not have a responsibility to provide a safe and healthy work environment? On top of that, these employees who make very little chose to break their NDAs, subjecting them to legal exposure, in order to talk about this. They're risking far more than just their jobs by going to the press.

If a company isn't comfortable with employees talking, the onus is on them to create an environment in which workers aren't motivated to go to the press. That very clearly isn't happening here.

> In my experience, such an experiment creates a very unhealthy office politics: people realize that they won't get this kind of compensation anywhere else, and their concern for not getting fired becomes more influential than personal ethics or professionalism.

Logically, this makes no sense to me. In a healthy work environment, strong personal ethics and professionalism should inherently insulate a worker from termination. If a worker feels that they need to behave unethically to stay employed, that says a lot about the culture of the company. Good people in good work environments don't think this way. But I'd love to see some data on this if you have any.

Personally, I find your response to be emblematic of what is wrong with our industry. Completely ignoring the quantity and power of the filth that social media is able to generate and being ok with shoveling this shit to "unskilled" workers and letting them handle the consequences of dealing with that garbage on a daily basis. Just brush it off as a by product of capitalism/the labor market - "They need a service performed, they found people willing to do that service for the money offered".

You ignore the human cost of all of this and brush off peoples experiences as "handpicked horror stories" - you are completely detached from the real world. . Despite your claims, this is 100% a problem of Facebook's making.

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