It's obviously horrible doing this as a job and it's obviously a bit more common on Facebook than say, a large old school internet forum, but... at least in this case people are paid to do this. Reddit mods and old school forum mods have to deal with this stuff for free.
I've done commercial moderation before and I would sooner go jobless than go back to exposing myself to the kinds of things people have to when doing this professionally. It's the kind of things you wish there was a brain cleaning solution for, but there isn't so it's stuck there basically forever (though I suspect the alcoholism rate is higher among people who have to handle this kind of thing than in the general population).
The commercial moderation team I was on actually ended up separating out a task force for handling particularly gnarly content so that people had a way of opting out of being exposed to it (in our case we were responding to user reports rather than randomly stumbling on things, so manually filtering reports was feasible), which I think is the responsible approach since there are plenty of other moderation tasks to handle and some people are more or less sensitive to this content.
Just out of college in the mid-90s, I worked for a few months at a small local software company in the last throws of death. As a last grasp at survival, all the programmers switched to doing cold call sales. With phones.
I would stare at mutilated children all day long rather than go back to cold calling. I was miserable and I hated every moment of every day until the company (happily, for me) closed up. Yet I know people who somehow think it's perfectly normal to dial random numbers and try to pitch them something. They're made of different stuff.
I've talked to people who make the same claim about computer programming. They'd rather starve.
Facebook has 10,000 moderators. I'm pretty sure there are at least 10k people in the world who are psychologically fit for content policing. It's doesn't have to be for everyone.
I don't think many people are immune to PTSD, but I suppose sociopaths need jobs too. But I'm not sure you want to hire a department of sociopaths.
My point is, some people simply aren’t traumatized by photos/videos, either via talent or training, and because of this they can process it enough to categorize it and keep their emotional/social/intellectual distance. That doesn’t make them sociopaths and it certainly doesn’t make them bad people.
A bleeding anus is just a thing that happens to people. It's a bit gross but I don't know why anyone should be traumatized by it.
The kind of content that these moderators have to deal with goes well beyond the mere abject.
Fixing a sewer is gross. Extermination is gross, not traumatic, unless you have extreme empathy for small rodents and insects. Doctors deal with very few remotely bleeding anuses on the order of one a week/month maybe versus one a minute. None of these should be called real sickos, but none would be expected to develop PTSD either.
A significantly bigger portion of the population would be traumatized and develop PTSD by the level of exposure of content moderation. While not nearly all are sociopaths, they 100% will be represented higher even without factoring in selection bias. Hiring a department of them would not be inconceivable, putting the validity of that aside.
You also make the jump from sociopath to bad person, which many I'm sure would have some qualms with as a categorical.
PTSD is real but lots of people still go to war and not everyone comes back a basketcase. Most don't, in fact.
No, I've never had a job watching pictures of mutilated children all day. But like a lot of naturally curious people, I've searched out and watched bloody videos of beheadings and car accidents and whatnot. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't really traumatic either. If I didn't already have a much more lucrative career, I don't think I'd suffer too much as a Facebook censor.
Does that make me a sociopath? My wife and son don't think so, nor do my close friends. I'm not sure if I should feel a little offended here.
On the other hand, I may still have PTSD from those days of cold calling as a junior software engineer 25 years ago. I hate phones. Maybe people are just wired differently.
Why not, if they do the work well?
And anyway, they'd be working from home, these days.
Big companies like Facebook (although they are not alone) don't do that. That costs money. They use disposable workers, like on-shore or off-shore contractors, and do industrial-style quotas/piecework methods to maximize productivity.
When you hire like that, you'll have a normal distribution of people. On the left there will be pre-broken people who get pleasure from watching decapitation videos and nasty shit, on the right you'll have people who are traumatized and broken by the work, and in the middle you have people who will cope for some period of time, and burn out.
There exist jobs, like slaughterhouse knockers, which are linked to causing PTSD and increased criminal behavior. It's not far fetched to believe these moderator jobs do too.
It wasn't that long ago HN was abuzz about large numbers of suicides at Foxconn... until someone realized that the suicide rate was actually slightly below the community average. I simply don't trust arguments without statistics anymore.
'Drug-induced amnesia' to reduce long term memory generation is a thing and is sometimes used before traumatic surgical procedures. It needs to be taken in advance and is probably not very healthy. Plus I would have serious ethical concerns with jobs that would encourage that.
It sounds too simple to work, but worth a shot.
I can go door to door asking people to change something, and dozens of my volunteers will feel useful but overwhelmed by how much work there is to do in a city of a million people. Or I can go to city council meetings, and get more leverage there. Or if I can convince one high profile citizen to participate, others will follow. Or I can get into contact with the mayor, state congressional members, the governor, federal congressional members.
It's possible that if I convince the correct five people that they will take half of this burden off of my hands. You'd be crazy not to reach for a lever like that. They are a juicy target, and not just from a punitive standpoint. Of course when you are rebuffed repeatedly by a potential ally, then it's a very human (if questionable) response to seek out some sort of punishment.
edit: What I mean to say is, people have been organizing against FB, AMZN, and tech in general for the past few years now. The last is reactionary but opposition to FB and AMZN has meaningful academia, ngo/gov, and general support.
But... that group wouldn't be able to do nearly what it has if it weren't for funding from foundations and the department of neighborhoods, and resources on permanent loan from another public sector organization. You might argue it couldn't exist at all.
I think I would say that both are necessary but insufficient.
edit: https://qz.com/1704143/the-antitrust-case-against-facebook/
I also think part of the objection here is around off-shoring. It's similar to other complaints about off-shored jobs: we're farming out unpleasant work to people that get paid less and have much less support (e.g. mental health).
That's an interesting point, and has me wondering something.
If a site like Facebook opened up a volunteer moderator scheme where people could sign up to filter out stuff that broke their rules, would it make things better or worse on a moral level?
What about a US/Europe based agency that did this thing onshore as a contract deal?
Disclosure: I work for but don't represent Google. This is my own opinion.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
As for the volunteer side, it's a really interesting debate. Others in this thread have pointed out Reddit as an example of this in practise. I think the sheer amount of money that Facebook has means that relying on volunteers to (potentially) inflict emotional damage upon themselves wouldn't be a great look.
I think they tend to take an "if in doubt, remove it" approach which basically allows anyone who doesn't like a niche page for whatever reason to have it taken down through sheer attrition, if you report it enough it'll probably go down eventually even for stupid reasons. I actually ended up writing an app to cut Facebook out of our system altogether (it was kind of similar to Yik Yak with a much better moderation system and better anonymity protection - I really can't be arsed to deal with a GDPR lawsuit...) but we couldn't launch it in part because it took me ages to develop as I've since graduated and work as a full-time developer and because coronavirus meant our launch event got cancelled. I might take it live when students go back this year, but I'm concerned that with nothing much going on it'll fizzle and die because there's nothing interesting to post about. It'll all depend on how the Welsh government lift the coronavirus restrictions.
I don't think at the same level. Social media usage went from 10% of the population to 79% from 2005 to 2015 and was even lower a few years before this. So current social media companies operate at unprecedented scales. Moreover, the smaller percentage of people usage social media in earlier times tended to be "sophisticated users" who didn't necessarily expect their feed to be systematically filtered.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/10/08/social-netwo...