More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators sue after diagnoses of PTSD

It’s like the original massive scale organization.

Isn't this similar to why people unfamiliar with that style of seafood would feel sick -- cultural views on what is and is not normal food -- and not because of their view of mortality?

Not to mention the millions of Americans working in the livestock and agriculture business who see up close every day how food comes to be.

A significant portion of the American population engages directly with their food and the death process. Citing one gimmicky example of Asian culture where squirmy seafood is part of the show doesn't say anything about the culture of entire nations. That is not how the majority of Japanese consume seafood. It's just as anomalous there. You only know about it because it's unusual enough to get reported.

You can pick your lobster out of the tank and eat it at American restaurants too. Oysters and clams on the half-shell are still alive when we eat them.

The organizer is even called a "fight choreographer".

And I wasn't talking about action hero movies.

This probably means fewer human reviewers reviewing a firehose, not the same number of human reviewers reviewing content at a slower rate.

I fail to see how this addresses my previous questions of "it's purely a monetary dispute?" and "where do you draw the line?". If a job "Causes PTSD" (whatever that means), then what? Are you entitled to hazard pay? Does this work out in the end to a higher minimum wage for certain jobs? Moreover, we don't have similar classifications for other hazards, some of which are arguably worse. For instance, dying is probably worse than getting PTSD, but the most dangerous jobs have pay that's well below the national median wage[1][2]. Should workers in those jobs be able to sue for redress as well?

[1] https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

[1] https://www.policepac.org/uploads/1/2/3/0/123060500/the_effe...

Not in the sense that matters here: the caller doesn't pay (unless the call is frivolous), leading to more calls that are preemptive, overly cautious or for non-live-threatening cases. That behind the scenes people and equipment are paid for and a whole structure to do that exists isn't really relevant here

> Do we think paramedics in Germany are more susceptible to PTSD

No, we think that there are far more paramedics than ICU or ER staff, and helping them in small ways is pretty easy. For ICU and ER staff you would obviously need other measures, like staffing those places with people less likely to get PTSD or giving them regular counseling by a staff therapist (I don't know how this is actually handled, just that the problem is very different than the issue of paramedics)

We would probably disagree on what change we think is beneficial, but in terms of catalyzing the changes I find appealing, I see plenty of it myself. I'm not sure how I could dig up a study on something like this, but I'm operating on the assumption that more poor people would advocate the changes I'm interested in than rich, because the changes I want would largely be intended to benefit the former, potentially at the expense of the latter. I see this assumption largely confirmed in the world. That's why I find the prospect of making posting expensive threatening to society's capacity for beneficial change. The effect depends on what model you use to price social media use, how high you set the prices, how you regulate the revenue, etc, but I think the effect needs to be mitigated. In essence, my primary concern with this idea is that it may come from an antidemocratic impulse, not a will to protect moderators. If you don't possess that impulse, then I'm sorry to be accusing you of motives you don't possess, and I'll largely focus on the implementation details that would best protect the moderators while mitigating the suppression of discourse.

>you can start a non-profit or foundation to subsidize "poor people online".

Where are all the foundations helping provide moderator mental health treatment? This is a pretty widely reported issue; I'd expect to see wealthy benefactors trying to solve it, yet the problem remains unsolved. The issue, I think, is that there isn't enough money or awareness to go around to solve all niche financially-addressable problems. Issues have to have certain human-interest characteristics, then be carefully and effectively framed, to attract contributions from regular people. As such, I wouldn't want to artificially create a new problem, where poverty takes away basically the only meaningful voice a regular person has in the modern age, then expect somebody to come along and solve it with a charitable foundation. Again, if charity is this effective, then let's just start a foundation to provide pay and care to moderators. Would it attract contributions?

>the crypto-bros do this when they're trying to incentivize use of their products

The crypto-bros trying to incentivize use of their products have a financial incentive to do so. They're not motivated by the kindness of their own hearts. Where's the financial incentive to pay for poor people to post online?

>There is no difference between a bot and a human as far as a network is concerned. After all, bots are run by humans.

Most implementations of this policy would largely impact bot farms. If posts cost money, then there's a very big difference in the cost of a botnet and a normal account. Costs would be massively higher for a bot farm runner, and relatively insubstantial for a normal user. Such a policy would then most effectively suppress bots, and maybe the most extreme of spammers.

What I don't understand, then, is the association between bots/spammers and the shock garbage harming moderators. From what I know, bots aren't typically trying to post abuse, but to scam or propagandize, since they're run by actors either looking for a financial return or to push an agenda. If the issue is spammers, then I'd question whether that's the cause of moderator harm; I'd figure as soon as a moderator sees a single gore post, the account would get nuked. We should expect then that the harm is proportionate to the number of accounts, not posts.

If the issue is harmful accounts in large quantity, and easy account creation, then to be effective at reducing moderator harm, wouldn't you want to charge a large, one-time fee at account creation? If it costs ten dollars to make an account, bad actors would (theoretically) be very hesitant to get banned (even though in practice this seems inadequate to, e.g., suppress cheating in online games). I'd also be relatively fine with such a policy; nearly anyone could afford a single 5-10 usd fee for indefinite use, but repeat account creators would be suppressed.

>Simply making it cost something to post online will mean that people who want to post spam can directly pay for the mental healthcare of moderators who remove their content.

I don't think that adding a cost to the posts will end up paying for mental healthcare without careful regulation. The current poor treatment of moderators is a supply-demand issue, it's a relatively low-skill job and people are hungry, so you can treat them pretty bad and still have a sufficient workforce. They are also, if I'm correct, largely outsourced from places with worse labor protections. This gives the social media companies very little incentive to pay them more or treat them better.

An approach that might help is something like this: Require companies to charge a very small set amount to make each individual post, such that a normal user may pay in the realm of 5 usd in a month of use, but a spammer or bot farm would have to spend vastly more. Furthermore, but very important, require that this additional revenue be spent directly on the pay or healthcare of the moderation team.

In reality, though, I'd be very worried that this secondary regulation wouldn't enter or make it through a legislature. I'm also concerned that the social media companies would be the ones setting the prices. If such a cost became the norm, I expect that these companies would implement the cost-to-post as a subscription to the platform rather than a per-post price. They would immediately begin to inflate their prices as every subscription-based company currently does to demonstrate growth to shareholders. Finally, they'd pocket the gains rather than paying more to the moderators, since they have absolutely zero incentive to do anything else. I think this would cause the antidemocratic outcomes I'm concerned with.

My question for you, then, is whether you'd be interested in government regulation that implements a flat per-post or per-account-creation fee, not much more than 5usd monthly or 10usd on creation, not adjustable by the companies, and with the requirement that its revenue be spent on healthcare and pay for the moderation team?

Do you mean for everyone to be hunter-gatherers? Yes, that would be impossible. If you mean for a smaller number then it depends on the number.

“There is no ethical X under capitalism” is not license to stick our heads in the sand and continue to consume without a second thought for those who are being exploited. It’s a reminder that things need to change, not only in all the little tiny drop-in-a-bucket ways that individuals can afford to contribute.

But the thing is she's not gonna say "no", she would never say "no" because of the implication.

My point is, job shittiness can be priced in.

This was also during a time where Apple hadn’t pushed out e2ee for iCloud, so it didn’t even make sense.

If you look at the question from an originalist viewpoint: did the legislators who drafted the First Amendment, and voted to propose and ratify it, understand it as an exceptionless absolute or as subject to reasonable exceptions? I think if you look at the writings of those legislators, the debates and speeches made in the process of its proposal and ratification, etc, it is clear that they saw it as subject to reasonable exceptions – and I think it is also clear that they saw obscenity as one of those reasonable exceptions, even though they no doubt would have disagreed about its precise scope. So, from an originalist viewpoint, having some kind of obscenity exception seems very constitutionally justifiable, although we can still debate how to draw it.

In fact, I think from an originalist viewpoint the obscenity exception is on firmer ground than the child pornography exception, since the former is arguably as old as the First Amendment itself is, the latter only goes back to the 1982 case of New York v. Ferber. In fact, the child pornography exception, as a distinct exception, only exists because SCOTUS jurisprudence had narrowed the obscenity exception to the point that it was getting in the way of prosecuting child pornography as obscene – and rather than taking that as evidence that maybe they'd narrowed it a bit too far, SCOTUS decided to erect a separate exception instead. But, conceivably, SCOTUS in 1982 could have decided to draw the obscenity exception a bit more broadly, and a distinct child pornography exception would never have existed.

If one prefers living constitutionalism, the question is – has American society "evolved" to the point that the First Amendment's historical obscenity exception ought to jettisoned entirely, as opposed to merely be read narrowly? Does the contemporary United States have a moral consensus that individuals should have the constitutional right to produce graphic depictions of child sexual abuse, for no purpose other than their own sexual arousal, provided that no identifiable children are harmed in its production? I take it that is your personal moral view, but I doubt the majority of American citizens presently agree – which suggests that completely removing the obscenity exception, even in the case of virtual CSAM material, cannot currently be justified on living constitutionalist grounds either.

You didn't address it, you handwaved it.

> Why are you making the assumption that AI == no appeal and zero staff?

I explicitly stated the reason -- it is cheaper and it will work for the majority of instances while the edge cases won't result in losing a large enough user base that it would matter to them.

I am not making assumptions. Google notoriously operates in this fashion -- for instance unless you are a very popular creator, youtube functions like that.

> That makes zero sense, one has nothing to do with the other.

Cheaper and mostly works and losses from people leaving are not more than the money saved by removing support staff makes perfect sense and the two things are related to each other like identical twins are related to each other.

> The human element comes in for appeal process.

What does a company have to gain by supplying the staff needed to listen to the appeals when the AI does a decent enough job 98% of the time? Corporations don't exist to do the right thing or to make people happy, they are extracting value and giving it to their shareholders. The shareholders don't care about anything else, and the way I described returns more money to them than yours.