Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditions in Ireland
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But if you have privacy expectation on fb...
I dont think that would hurt anyone then
Why would anyone use FB for that? It is already very hard to run legal sex related groups on FB. Registration is pain etc..
Some other social networks are full of porn, but even those have zero tolerance for this.
So I think the privacy expectation for that kind of thing is low.
The information I've encountered on this topic is a pile of employees and journalists on one side painting a grim picture of life as a FB mod, and this one throwaway account on HN implying it's not so bad. Forgive me if I find that hard to believe.
I've seen Goatse, though - maybe it's just that everything else pales in comparison.
What they see is: Penis. Pages and pages of penis. Penis in all shapes and sizes and orientations and conditions. But it was all penis.
Younger adults don't shock easily because (a) they typically have less and feel less responsibility, (b) the thrill of breaking the rules tempers natural disgust at seeing edgy material, and (c) they have less life experience to have learned empathy for some kinds of people.
Of course, I might be extrapolating foolishly from my own life. I used to have more stomach for cruelty.
Disgust is a cultural learning, not a natural response.
Upset about not getting the same perks as other employees?
Signing restrictive NDAs for a job with exposure to extremely sensitive company processes and customer data?
The more I read about these stories, the more I’m inclined to believe Haidt’s “Coddled Mind” and Turchin’s “Elite Overproduction” theories as the root of much of the problems we’re facing in the west today.
> Only essential workers should travel to work. You should work from home unless you are providing an essential service and need to be physically present.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/covid19/living_with_co...
Facebook content moderation is unlikely to fall under "essential work" which is more concerned about healthcare, retail necessities (food/drink/medicine/cleaning supplies), and infrastructure. Given that they've pointed out moderators elsewhere can work from home, it's likely facebook cannot demonstrate that they need to be physically present to perform the work.
So yes, it is a matter for the government to get involved in if Facebook or its subcontractors are not complying.
As for Varadkar, getting involved is likely due to the fact this falls under his department's remit (as minister of enterprise), not his position as Tanaiste. But getting _personally_ involved is likely Leo looking for a good PR opportunity rather than the facebook employees insisting on the Tanaiste's personal attention. Or maybe he's just also their local TD, since his constituency is Dublin West where many people in Facebook offices in Dublin likely live.
As a society we get to decide what is a reasonable level of comfort and protection and it will always be a value judgement.
If we (as a society) guaranteed everybody enough resources to live, those types of jobs would need to be paid a more appropriate rate, including hazard pay.
That the money they make is based on the amount they can extract, and not on the value they provide. You're describing a system which is not democratic capitalism, it is serfdom.
If that were the case, why would we continue to allow that?
People work for incentives. People on HN work on their startups - why?
They could get a SW job and leave the stress behind, why do they have to struggle?
Some people will take the basics and be happy - thats their call. MANY others will do what it takes to get paid because that is what they want.
So if you aren't getting enough fruit pickers, well pay more. If apparently your going rate isn't high enough, well then those strawberries are perhaps not economically viable in the first place, since no one in your economy wants to do that work.
Obviously its a lot more complex, but the essence of economics is always - people act according to incentives.
There's no "we as society" that can just magically "provide the resources". The resources must happen, i.e. somebody actually needs to do the work. In other words, it's someone's job. There is no feasible way to run a society without people doing the work. In fact, the pandemic has been a good example of this, on so many levels - farmers in UK complaining that the strawberries are going to rot on the fields without immigrant labour (because of border lockdowns), shops almost running out of food (because of supply chain breakdowns, which governments took a lot of effort to protect/reestablish), mask & PPE shortages (because there's not enough people doing the work in factories - particularly in Europe), food deliveries (i.e. someone needs to actually do the work of getting in a car and driving around), ...
Everyone being paid more than a living wage is already choosing to do more work than they have to. Why do you assume that people would stop working, if they have a choice? It's already evident that people choose to work without coercion, if they are paid properly.
My point is that coercion via threat of personal destitution is bad and should be eliminated, not that work is bad.
Rights are oughts, not ises, IMO. (Oughts which I believe in, but still oughts).
Rights are components of a moral framework, inherently philosophical - unless you believe in a god. When someone says something IS a right, they are really saying "This is a fundamental assumption in the moral framework I believe to describe a just world"
I believe that only negative rights are and can be inherent.
You can build social contracts that help people get services and materials on top of this, because people care about each other.
I'd like to think that we can transcend "survival of the fittest" just a little bit. Besides, you never know if you might need some help from others for shelter, food, or warmth in the future.
And you can’t expect other people to share your philosophy either. Giving people shelter costs other people time and work. How will you pay for that?
> Giving people shelter costs other people time and work. How will you pay for that?
We've been doing this kind of thing since modern humans evolved (actually, probably longer). It's just the society got larger and got organized in to nations.
"Elite theory" in political science and sociology is closely related, e.g.: https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory, which has a history going back to ancient Greece. U. Delaware's polsci department has an intro to this in the US context: https://www1.udel.edu/htr/Psc105/Texts/power.html , and there's also this article by a prof at USCS: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/class_domination.html
Much of Chomsky's writing is concerned with such topics, e.g. https://truthout.org/articles/us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-... , which makes the point that the notion of an elite guardian class goes back to the founding of the US, and it in turn was based on ideas inherited from monarchies.
A couple of others of Chomsky's are https://chomsky.info/199606__/ or https://chomsky.info/20141202/ . These are just examples which deal with particular mechanisms of control which are used by elites to achieve outcomes in their favor.
Marx and Engels are relevant here also. Here's the opening sentence of Chapter I of the Communist Manifesto (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... ):
> "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
It goes on to discuss power structures in various types of historical society.
There's lots more out there - is there any particular aspect you're interested in?
> Humans are inherently tribal and a banded together since before we existed as a species. This wasn’t for the advantage of top animal.
Modern governments are not tribal societies, though. As I've observed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997576 , the Communist Manifesto Ch. 1 opens with the sentence, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," but adds a footnote about this referring to written history, i.e. history of post-tribal civilizations.
> I would posit that most historic human societies serve the same function.
Perhaps to some extent, but to help disabuse yourself of the notion of the benevolence of the ruling class in this respect, some of the references in my comment linked above might help. In particular, what Chomsky has to say about the elite "guardian class" in the US: https://truthout.org/articles/us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-...
The only way to solve this is to develop a technology that is advanced enough and cheap enough that everybody can guarantee themselves shelter, food, warmth without any other human involved.
I was also going to mention that this is actively prevented by modern society. In practice, you cannot forge these things by yourself, as you will soon be stopped by private landownership.
I imagine technology that some day advance enough and autonomous enough and cheap enough that enable me to live off the grid with supply of unlimited solar energy and robot that can make me food.
The only thing that can fix society is to have no society.
UBI is a coarse hack that can improve this situation up to a limited amount, but it's mainly an open problem. New ideas on this area are very welcome.
What your scenario changes is that the labor supply gets to be much more selective about the job they take. Supply and demand still exist. Moderating facebook is still a low skill desk job. The pay and benefit floor may be raised across the board, but I don't see what the market force would separate moderating facebook from the other jobs with comparable pay today.
Sure, you could quit a job moderating facebook and not have to worry about keeping yourself solvent. But the same goes for every other job. What would separate them from the jobs that they're on the same level with today?
Indeed, that's the point: to move away from the current system of the wealthy coercing and exploiting the not-wealthy.
I'm imagining jobs with (for example) a high emotional toll, disgust factor, risk factor.
I believe those aspects are presently undervalued (described above as jobs which "anyone can do"), so I imagine there would be a reassessment of how those tasks are valued. They would likely require relatively higher pay before people were willing to do them.
Jobs with generally poor working conditions, or a high degree of managerial control and low autonomy, could be re-factored into jobs with better working conditions, as people are more able to be selective on that basis.
That would do really weird economic things because either money would have to be something you really want since your basic needs are already covered, or the job would have to be very rewarding because you can basically choose not to go into work arbitrarily.
If you want mods to earn more create a social network and pay them more.
This is an entirely unrealistic and unhelpful suggestion.
Moderation is the job of editors and journalists being lost to social media and the internet.
All those millions of local news papers and reporters who had to make judgement calls on whether some content should be displayed, or whether it was not newsworthy?
That is part of what content moderation is, that process debt that SM firms don't want to pay for.
Want to be an underwater welder? Sure, here's your danger surcharge.
Want to be a cab driver on the night shift? Sure, here's your surcharge.
Only because it's a function of limiting supply (of willing labor). High danger means fewer people willing to do it, which means it pays more to attract willing candidates.
If there are still a ton of willing candidates, you don't get paid extra because you think it's dangerous work.
I'm not proposing any particular change here myself, i just want to push back against that fatalistic attitude.
IT IS low skill job, made by low qualified fresh graduates, and AI already handles big part of it.
You need to consider the effects of work on employees bodies and minds.
There is skill to be treated like a serf for a living and smiling to your masters who claim your labour is low skilled and not deserving of a fair (living) wage.
Real nurse has to deal with real blood and real gore. If you believe those mods should be paid more, you are out of your mind.
Anyway, this type of jobs will be soon replaced by AI classifiers. Nobody will suffer anymore.
Also, on AI classifiers, I think there are far too many nuanced situations to completely replace mods, and your comment about this is very hand-wavy, and even if you are right, we still need to deal with the problems we have now, not defer them by saying there will be a solution in the future.
But I am sure many of them would take this work for a bit of extra money. There are people from Middle East, Ukraine, Romania... We had millions refugees passing through Athens just a few years ago. Reality is simply very different here.
There have been many stories about this, one example: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
But for $35k/year you would find here many people with great english and university education. And life skills to handle this, for example former police officer.
Secondly Facebook has 11 categories of online harm, 1 of which is nudity.
> https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...
The list is:
Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity
Bullying and Harassment
Child Nudity and Sexual Exploitation of Children
Dangerous Organizations: Terrorism
Dangerous Organizations: Organized Hate
Fake Accounts
Hate Speech
Regulated Goods: Drugs
Regulated Goods: Firearms
Spam
Suicide and Self-Injury
Violent and Graphic Content
Adult nudity is 0.05%-0.06% of all content views. That is the same rate for violent and graphic content. This means people somewhere, are going through millions of pictures of graphic violence.
You could simply be dealing with the lucky team which just has to watch schlongs.
There's nothing to stop these people from starting their own moderation company that provides all the services they're demanding. Then they should lobby FB to use this company instead.
And 30 minutes is a pretty short period to get a representative sample of a service used by billions for many different activities (messaging, video calls, hobby groups, marketplace). The 'feed' that you scroll through is definitely a mixed bag, but Facebook has added focus to more specific and niche apps over time.
For my family we use Facebook because it is cross platform (25 people, several with Android, most with iPhone, and some that like to use it by web), everyone already has an account (ages from 25 to 65), and the quality of the service is high and consistent for both messages and video calls. We frequently do a video call with all members of the family across many devices and 'it just works'.}
Also, meeting in person hasn't really been 'allowed' in almost a year. #covid19