Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw2838 | Hacker News Reader

I deal with FB mods in Athens, Greece. This job is subcontracted to tech support company that usually handles phones. Low skilled, unqualified work, done mostly by students for a year after school. Working conditions and pay are ok for Greece. There is no trauma, worst stuff is soft core p#rn. Most of them work from home, as mandated by Greek gov.

View on HN

How do these mods avoid the disturbing material?

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.

Blind luck or maybe there isn't as much disturbing material on Facebook as one is lead to believe.

That would surprise me greatly. In my online life I've seen stomach-turning troll content everywhere from Duolingo to bitcoin forums. But really, hasn't everyone?

Not really, no.

I actually only added that line as a postscript to not sound like I was making some kind of feeble boast. Ie: 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: racist memes on Etsy, animal carcasses on glassdoor.com...'

And I actually really wonder if other people see such things, because I really don't. Not saying they don't exist, but they don't seem to get pushed into my "timelines". What you could find if you were looking for it I don't know.

I've seen Goatse, though - maybe it's just that everything else pales in comparison.

Duolingo?

Duolingo had (or perhaps still has?) language forums. Duolingo used 'move fast and break things' moderation, and as a result there was a constant trickle of posts by racists and perverts.

The barrier for entry to facebook is quite high compared to many other places on the internet, which probably helps!

It’s a numbers game. For every piece of truly disturbing material there are probably thousands of dick pics.

Your feed is pretty much posts from friends, groups, things you follow, and ads. If your friends aren't sharing old rotten.com posts and posting dick pics, it's probably pretty good.

I was an early-ish Facebook employee, and started before they contracted out moderation. I once passed a content moderator in the lunch room, flipping through flagged images, about twenty per second. Presumably she was just reviewing user & automatic flags for accuracy.

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.

Porn detection with Deep Learning is 99% solved problem, I bet those moderators only get to view content where the model reports lower confidence, the rest is automatically removed. The same for gore etc.

Think how many image posts and messages there are on Facebook and Messenger. Assume your Deep Learning model has 99.9% recall. It will still miss millions per day.

That's conceivably manageable if you're Facebook's size with tons and tons of moderators, while improving the data set.

Which is exactly what they do! For better or worse.

20 images per second x 8 hours a day is half million images per day per employee (quoted by gp, though its seem to be unsustainable), and Facebook has an army of content moderators so they probably manage somehow.

“Oh, look, a hot dog!”

Maybe some are more thick-skinned than others. After years of being on the internet and having seen all sorts of stuff I barely bat an eyelid nowadays but if you're not used to it I guess it would be more traumatising.

I think it's more a function of age. People in highschool or college can stomach more than older adults.

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.

> natural disgust at seeing edgy material

Disgust is a cultural learning, not a natural response.

Fair enough. The point about aging that I had in mind doesn't change if we redefine 'natural disgust' as 'culturally taught disgust' In general, the older you get, the further you get from mum and dad dictating your behavior, and so the less enjoyable it is to, for example, be rude/crude for its own sake.

That's just... false. Disgust is a response we evolved to keep us from eating things that could kill us.

It's probably a mixture, but who knows. Chomsky and Skinner could probably debate it for several lifetimes.

It's actually both! Freakonomics did a great segment on the difference and the different types of disgust. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/disgust/

I remember well the times my friends used to send each other stuff from rotten. Not that I particularly enjoyed that, but I suppose it was part of becoming more mature? I liked the freedom of back then though, I feel like today's internet has become too politically correct

If they WFH, then nothing will prevent them from 'copying' any material they want, even if by cellphone photo of the computer screen, no?

Well, in office there was very strict no smart phone policy. Privacy laws were big issue when WFH started in march. This company also does phone support for other clients, and handles credit cards. There are huge fines. I am not sure how they made it compliant for FB. Propably sensitive stuff is still handled from office.

But if you have privacy expectation on fb...

They certainly hide also your personal information like name, peofike picture, etc... So at the end its just moderating texts or pictures without an author? Maybe they also automatically replace names in text?

I dont think that would hurt anyone then

Child abuse pictures/videos can still be shared or sold online easily without PII. Other exceptions are celebrities or the difficulty in identifying PII in text.

Facebook is the Silkroad 3.0 LOL

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.

Couldn't you just watermark all photos before showing them to workers? Probably wouldn't stand to sophisticated attacks but would guard against theft from "low-skilled" employees...

Well if the content is being reported it is more likely public already or "almost public" (a big group or someone with lots of contacts)

So I think the privacy expectation for that kind of thing is low.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com