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Comment by muragekibicho | Hacker News Reader

Related to your point - Meta got sued by the human team employed to detect gore, violence and death. They fired the entire human content team at their biggest content moderation site in Nairobi, Kenya after the team fought to unionize. Here's the story - https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/30/meta-and-sama-face-legal-a...

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The story you are describing is the exact story described in TFA of the post you are commenting on.

There's a paywall. Couldn't read the story! Lol sorry

Pro tip for the future if you wanna read any paywalled article, you can add archive.today/ at the front of the URL and you can see it without paying.

I think big tech companies are pushing towards AI to avoid somewhat similar court cases. I can't imagine how *less stressful* it is for employers who avoid legal tussles with their subcontractors. In this case, Meta bore the brunt of their contractor, Samasource's, underdealings!

Large tech companies employ subcontractors specifically to take flak for this kind of thing. They save money, but more importantly deflect criticism by allowing subcontractors to engage in employment practices that break their own policies. Your sympathy should never default to a large wealthy company, but to the exploited, usually under paid, employees and 'contractors' forced to do unpalatable things out of the eye of regulation.

See: "we didn't know we had slaves making our clothes, it was those dastardly factories that we contracted with!"

There's an important distinction between what Meta is doing here and other types of low wage work such as clothes manufacturing. We have to consider where the work lies on the spectrum of voluntary vs coercive. The problem with Meta's gore content moderation job is that the people signing up for it didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Or if they did, they weren't aware of the long term health consequences (but Meta surely were). So it's closer to coercive than voluntary. Meta were abusing the information asymmetry. If Meta gave each new hire a dossier outlining how bad the health impacts will be before the contract is signed, then I wouldn't have a problem with it, because anyone who signs up knows what they're getting into. But Meta doesn't do that. They obscure this for new hires in order to exploit the information asymmetry.

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