Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare’
bbc.com
bbc.com
You are pasting graphic content on the square: try it and see how soon the police come after you and you have to at least answer before a judge.
You are uploading graphic content to the web? We call the police, nice and simple. And let the judiciary deal with it.
Otherwise what you have is this: people with absolutely no training, with no real support and with bad salaries doing something they should not: policing.
This is fantasy, even if it were desirable. In most places the judiciary struggles to enforce the laws we already have. In the UK something like 90%+ of burglaries and robberies go unsolved. The figures for rape are even worse. And those are crimes where there is a certainty they were committed by someone in the same country as the person reporting the crime (at least at the time) and where there is broad agreement they are serious crimes, worthy of police attention.
If you hand out really graphic leaflets in the street you might eventually be arrested and you might eventually up before a judge (but this is no way certain) but you'd really have to go out of your way to annoy people. You're more likely to just be told to stop it and have your leaflets taken away after a fight occurs. If you were handing out child porn then sure, you'll get arrested but that's because you're standing right there and it requires very little police time to investigate the matter.
The 'town square' notion isn't apt because that's a public space. A better analogy is a private party as each and every platform is, at the end of the day, owned and managed by private legal entities.
If publishers were to verbatim publish whatever crazy, illicit content was mailed to them by their subscribers/readers, they'd be prosecuted within a fortnight. There's plenty of jurisprudence in the U.S. alone.
Online platforms escape legal liability because of Section 230 which states:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The big dilemma is that Section 230 needs to be reconsidered if you want to do something about the platforms that facilitate sharing graphic content, hate speech and so on. That's problematic because Section 230 has, arguably, allowed for the Internet to become a free haven for whatever anyone wants to share and build.
The other option is passing the buck to the free market. That is: if you don't like what you see, move over to a different platform. Or: don't use, or work for a platform that doesn't align with your own morals and values.
While that's a nice sentiment: the reality clearly doesn't work like that. Why does someone decide to work for Facebook as a moderator in the first place? Is it because they genuinely want to make a career out of this? Or is it because social/economic circumstances push them in that direction (e.g. lack of other career options, tradeoffs preventing them to move towards other career options,...)?
The same is true about the rise of social media. Billions of people are connected online. And they might seemingly have a ton of agency. But reality is that the vast majority of ordinary people spend the vast majority of time on a handful of social media, posting and sharing content, building an online identity... on a 3rd party platform which they don't own. Without hyperbole: they can't readily migrate lest they lose connection with the digital communities which is inextricably hosted on these platforms. That's just how a matter of networking effects.
All in all, in closing this diatribe: law enforcement and justice can't do much unless there's a clear, modern legal framework which can be readily applied to the middle men.
The problem isn't that it's not illegal, it's that they still need to delete the content.
It's like saying "just call the police" to someone who's just been mugged, they still need to get to a phone and cancel all the cards. You haven't solved the mugging problem and they were probably going to anyway.
Especially given that in many countries Facebook doesn't contribute to public infrastructure all that much - eg. their effective tax rate in the UK is below 2% [1]. So the deal is that I (as a taxpayer) support the infrastructure, while they'll outsource their workload onto it, "calling police" for the pettiest things all around the clock. Thanks!
The problem here isn't that there aren't enough laws, it's that the scale of illegal content being uploaded is vast and moderators are unprepared, untrained and underpaid because their jobs are considered unskilled, low value labor. that is what needs to change.
Child porn though? Or something else that is an easy statistics boost? Russian police would be __very__ glad to act upon such information :)
Police currently doesn't even solve most of the cases where there is actual damage (stolen items, violence,...).
It's a private house open to the public.
These platforms don't want this, though. They don't want the public to own their platforms and they don't want freedom of speech to apply.
What will probably happen is the government will police the platforms for them, while they maintain ownership. We see this pattern a lot.
I could see each power controlling their own section in that case
Do you think sites like old Liveleak should be illegal?
What Facebook wants to do is curate content beyond the legal minimum and that means they have to sift through a lot of legal but objectionable content.
I'm not sure the analogy really holds even though I agree that it is not reasonable to expect these people to perform this role full time.
Many other jobs (e.g. in healthcare) are just as taxing and equally responsible for lives, but fail to enjoy these protections.
Bullying, threats, the list goes on.
Ideally something like this should make it into a law or something similar, because trusting FB to do the right thing is probably not the way to go. (Having said that, that law would apply to only a handful of companies might be difficult to put in place; and then they'd outsource the job to "friendlier" country...)
I suspect the proper reason is because they might endanger others.
Outside of France, the law generally doesn't protect you too much from taxing yourself on the job.
Moderators should look for a different job, if they don't like it.
I wonder whether content moderation jobs at Facebook et al. include sufficiently stringent pre-screening of candidates for mental fitness.
It is the least bad solution we have to the most bad problem. I'm not saying you're wrong, but the discourse around how we can find the "right" people to do this job assumes that such people exist and aren't just desperate for a job.
Some people would be perfectly fine doing this kind of job.
Of course, that is assuming they truly have “no problems dealing with” that content, and won’t be triggered by it to do something terrible in real life. Not sure if mental health care is/can be advanced enough to tell precisely.
I read a story about a cop that watched all seized child pornography to catalogize the victims and perpetrators. It probably requires a certain kind of person.
One is a joke platform where no one really take each other seriously, and the other is a group of people who think of themselves too seriously, but really communicate in the same patterns, pretending to solve problems of the world
bunch of morons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20222594
If you care about your own well-being, then don't become a Facebook moderator.
Do you realise that not everyone has a choice of which jobs they can take?
We require health and safety assessments in physically hazardous jobs to make them safer for workers. You aren't allowed to work in a nuclear power station without a dosimeter - we don't say "if you care about not getting cancer, then don't work with nuclear."
And this is entirely common-sense -- if a company doesn't provide protections for its workers, "just don't work there" won't solve the problem of the company not protecting the workers it does have. The workers who can refuse to work will (probably) do so, the company will then hire more desperate people, and the steady-state of this system is that such companies will be full of people who were unable to refuse -- thus the company can just continue not protecting its employees. This is basically the fundamental argument behind all employment protections -- substitute "dosimeters" for "lunch breaks", "minimum wage", "paid leave", or "overtime pay" and the same argument applies.
"On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog" -- Peter Steiner
I think this is the pointy end of a deeper problem in the design of the internet.
If a priest or paediatric oncologist knows how to use tor and can maintain anonymity skilfully enough that it would be too effortful for the law to track him down... then his ability to upload graphic content will scale faster than the ability to censor it.
I do not have a solution.
Even on a college campus with a decent network, you ran the risk of getting kicked off if you misused the Broadcast address. Why? Cause there were software and hardware limitations that would bring down or cripple the network.
All that has been overcome. And now everyone on the planet can broadcast 24x7 almost for free.
This is the big issue.
If every neuron in the brain had Broadcast capability how would such a brain work?
Some food for thought - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10464
forums, social medias, meme sites, youtube, comment sections everywhere, hn or its brother reddit, etc...
"Web 2.0" changed nothing in that regard except making asynchronous requests possible with AJAX, allowing sites to become more complex and allow for realtime updating. But yeah, people have been posting gore, porn and CP everywhere since the dark ages.
I'd hate to be one of these moderators.
And also to people who can't, apparently, and "go public" about it.