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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.