OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.
It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).
The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
These are pretty clear laws established by a democratic government with a pretty good record for rule of law.
The fact is that simple scale means that there will always be something, no matter how abhorrent. Small scale doesn't change this, it just concentrates it.
Would you drive a car optimized for profit that didn't have those safety features? How about on a highway? Daily?
Demanding some perfect immediate magic response there is the equivalent of asking car manufacturers to prevent all deaths.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
Here it's said that it's the users fault. I disagree. Completely. Most of these companies, staying on topic many of these companies have laid off the employees who tried to prevent things like this,
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/meta-layoffs-ai.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-ai-safety-institute-will-be...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqd54wpEfjKJsJBk6/xai-s-grok...
The list of not even trying anymore goes on and on. Mechahitler was also fun
So yes, yes, let's do like we did with cars.
Big “citation needed” here. My bet is that Meta have far better moderation systems than any other social media company on the planet.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
Moderators need to actually understand the context of the picture/video, which requires knowledge of culture and language of the people sharing the pictures. It's really difficult to do that without hiring moderators from every culture in the world.
But small federated servers can often align along real world human social networks, so it's easier for the server admin to understand what should be removed.
My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting on a watchlist for having a telehealth-first primary care provider insurace plan and asking for advice on their toddler's chickenpox.
Human review? Meta has small armies worth of content moderators already that tend to burn out with psychological problems and have a suicide rate where you're probably better off going to fight in a real war. (This includes workers hired by Sama in Kenya, to link back to the OP.)
I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.
It is a problem of their own making.
Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.
One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.
Do we really have to give the benefit of the doubt to the agency that was literally running one of the largest CSAM distribution outlets in the world for years as a honeypot?
Of course, that was 60 years ago.
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
I guess "other forces were worse" can certainly be true, but then how low are we holding the bar?
And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
Child abusers are twisted people, and I really don’t care much what happens to them, but making it impossible for them to use the internet means sterilizing the whole thing.
But that's not possible in today's oligopoly of social media. An invisible algorithm will ban you, and there is no way back, and few alternates. Big Social Media is way worse from a sanitizing perspective than some federated social media.
I know a local blog that pre-approves every comment. He lets a lot of stuff through, because he lets people be dumbasses. If he were personally liable, the conversation would get a lot quieter.
This is already the case. There is a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content that is actively censured on social medias because they include words or pictures of organs while same social medias actively encourage and develop algorithm to push underage girls (and possibly boys) posting pictures of themselves in sexual poses, attires and context.
Big tech and social media networks love and push CSAM, they just hide the genitals but the content really is the same.
Like what? It’s all there on Wikipedia, and for all of Wiki’s faults, I have trouble imagining what kind of useful, educational, medical information you will find on social media that is better than that.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
If you find Wikipedia too complicated, you probably aren’t looking up your medical diagnoses.
So if you want to send someone to jail, just talk your way into joining their server, upload some illegal content, and report them for it?
> Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Why would someone join a server with active moderation if they wanted to share CSAM with their social media friends?
They would seek out one of those servers that was set up specifically for those groups, where it was known to be a safe space.
This is what many people don't get about federated networks: The people in those little servers DGAF if you block them. They want to be surrounded by their likeminded friends away from the rules of some bigger service like Facebook or Twitter. Federated social media is the perfect platform for them because they can find someone who set up a server in some other country with their own idea of rules and join that, not be subject to the regulations of mainstream social media.
It also makes it relatively easy to avoid, as server admins share blocklists. I know a dozen servers offhand that i'd block if i ran another fediverse server.
Fosstodon fediverse server doesn't have this issue, for example.
I replied this way because the way you wrote it, it sounds like an indictment of a system that's designed to avoid advertisers getting user profiles, over all else.
The problem is the people who participate in this (the illegal and immoral), and not "the network."
Because of course the people congregating to do illegal stuff online are going to do it in your jurisdiction where prosecution is guaranteed
We're all aware that it is possible to run a private website, forum, chat server (irc-like or discord-like), including "federated" servers, but not federate? in fact, Element, a chat client, has a parent company that even sells "completely private, encrypted chat", which will never "leak."
I'd much rather have leaky CSAM federated servers than every bad actor behind a VPN. I don't want to see the shit, but i can null route the entire domain and be done with it, or i can send links to my local authorities and let them deal with it.
A similar thing is racism, would you rather have someone be openly racist, or just privately? This was said, i believe, about Joe Biden, about why people tend to trust Trump more, since he wears everything on his sleeve, and Biden speaks out of both sides of his mouth. Like how Carlin said Clinton won people over by saying "Hi folks, i'm completely full of shit and what do you think about that? and folks said, "well, at least he's honest."
Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
and authorities will know if there's new CSAM, and will crop the images and send it to the groups that track down where clothes came from, what the decor in the room means, if there's anything else identifiable. None of this is possible if it's underground and "non-federated."
I'd rather CSAM ceased to be a thing; but again, i'd much rather have idiots announcing it publicly than on an E2EE private network.
Actually companies should be bullied about privacy and copyright so they are unable to share any contents at a scale with 3rd parties. Thus they have to solve it on their own and forced to realize their business model is shit.
No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content.
That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off illegal content. The only site that was ever forced to curate its content was Pornhub, because they're sufficiently large, work in a jurisdiction that has laws and can be held accountable. From a content moderation standpoint going after a million web forums is an absolute pain in the ass compared to going after Facebook.
Which is the first argument any decentralization advocate always brings up (and they're correct to do so), censorship is harder and evasion of law enforcement easier when dealing with a network of independent actors.
You now have 100x the total human effort for mods to review and ban him.
That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
No it's not. It's certainly not my choice. No one asked me if it's okay for Facebook to distribute CSAM because you insist it would be worse if it didn't.
Can you elaborate on what exactly is wrong there? Do you see the third alternative C and it's not the "whole choice"? Or are you saying A or B do not exist and therefore there's no choice? Please name C, or tell us why A or B don't exist (or aren't acceptable), or explain your view that doesn't fit into these options.
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make
is not correct: It is a tradeoff that one specific person can choose to make, but not one that I or we can choose to make, because we don't control facebook. Mark Zuckerberg controls facebook. He alone can choose to make that tradeoff, or not, on behalf of society.
Yes, he alone can make the choice. Not you or I.
Now consider that some of those smaller entities might not be even notionally interested in avoiding the existence of that specific type of content on their platform, and are small enough for regulators to be unaware of its existence?
Care to address the actual issue?
What I and others are trying to tell you is that your obsessive focus on Facebook as if they are the root cause of the problem is incorrect. There is no magic solution I'm aware of because each of them have some sort of tradeoff.
The most extreme version of content moderation I can think of is that a human being examines and approves every single message of any kind before it is published, any image of a minor is banned because it's too hard to objectively define child porn (that still leaves the open question of how to determine if someone is a minor visually), and no accounts for anyone under the age of legal majority are allowed, as verified by a legal ID that is checked by a human being.
Even in that case, kids will find some way to get an account or just use their parent's account, and the door is cracked open again. And the pedophiles will just go elsewhere, probably using a service with significantly less resources available to attack the problem, which is probably worse than the status quo.
This doesn't even touch on the privacy concerns that most people would have with every message being reviewed.
As I said before, I would welcome you to share the solution that you imply exists which addresses every issue above.
> Content moderation is a general problem,
Easy to reform any problem in a more general manner. Doesn't make your discussion any less dishonest.
>As I said before, I would welcome you to share the solution that you imply exists which addresses every issue above.
It's not really my burden to come up with a solution. That's ridiculous. It's Facebook's problem, not mine. You haven't even disputed that they could not do a better job. Your argument was that it's better for the child porn to be on Facebook than smaller websites, which is specious at best.
You've decided that there's some relatively easy solution to a problem that existed before Facebook and will exist after Facebook that Facebook should be implementing to solve what appears to be an unsolvable problem to basically everyone else on earth, yet you have no ability to describe this solution and don't seem to have put much effort into thinking about it beyond assuming it exists.
No one is arguing that it's better for child porn to be anywhere. What myself and others have said is that there are tradeoffs to be made concerning content moderation, and you basically refuse to even contemplate the theoretical benefits and downsides of different approaches and their outcomes.
I don't know what your motivation is, whether you just have some irrational hatred of Facebook, are a zealot concerning child porn, both, or there's some other explanation for your obstinate ignorance, but attempting to talk to you appears to be a complete waste of time.
I never used these words either. That's where the dishonesty is. Look back at our thread, how many times have you done that? You ask me to define basic words and then don't respond when I do... everyone else on earth agrees with you? Just read this thread. There is literally someone else in this very thread here agreeing with me.
>No one is arguing that it's better for child porn to be anywhere
You did. You argued it's better to be on Facebook than on smaller sites and audaciously asked me how I could disagree?
> I don't know what your motivation is, whether you just have some irrational hatred of Facebook, are a zealot concerning child porn, both, or there's some other explanation for your obstinate ignorance, but attempting to talk to you appears to be a complete waste of time.
It's much more telling that you think those are the only two reasons why someone would think "Facebook should really do something about its child porn problem already."
>but attempting to talk to you appears to be a complete waste of time.
Good riddance
You don't use any words, other than repeatedly saying "Facebook should be solving this problem they created", so people have to fill in the gaps because that is a very strange perspective and you refuse to elaborate.
> That's where the dishonesty is. Look back at our thread, how many times have you done that? You ask me to define basic words and then don't respond when I do... everyone else on earth agrees with you? Just read this thread. There is literally someone else in this very thread here agreeing with me.
You don't define basic words, that's the issue.
I never said everyone agrees with me, and the one person "agreeing" with you is just as clueless about the pros and cons of a centralized vs distributed system.
> You did. You argued it's better to be on Facebook than on smaller sites and audaciously asked me how I could disagree?
I did not. You're either confusing me with someone else (and twisting their words) or just imagining messages, just like you're imagining that you've diligently responded to every request for clarification on your ill-defined yet adamant stance.
> It's much more telling that you think those are the only two reasons why someone would think "Facebook should really do something about its child porn problem already."
Again, feel free to elaborate.
> Good riddance
Likewise
Thinking that Facebook should solve its own child pornography problem is not a weird perspective at all. What is weird about that? What do I need to elaborate on? That's my position. Are you saying it's unfounded?
>You don't define basic words, that's the issue.
I did, you asked me to and didn't respond.
>I never said everyone agrees with me, and the one person "agreeing" with you is just as clueless about the pros and cons of a centralized vs distributed system.
Oh, excuse me, not everyone, just "basically everyone else on earth". Again, incredibly dishonest on your part.
>I did not. You're either confusing me with someone else (and twisting their words) or just imagining messages, just like you're imagining that you've diligently responded to every request for clarification on your ill-defined yet adamant stance.
There's nothing ill-defined about my stance. It's very clear. Meta should clean up its child porn mess,
>Again, feel free to elaborate.
Well, I think it's incredibly disingenuous to act as if the only reason one could come to such belief is because of an extreme opinion. I'm willing to bet you that most people would agree with me that Facebook should do something meaningful about its child porn problem. For no discernable reason you jumped to the conclusion that what I stated is an extreme opinion only shared by zealots. I'd bet most parents would agree. I'd bet most people would agree. In fact, you haven't at all explained what is extreme about that opinion. I think most people think child pornography is a problem, and I think most people think that Facebook, a website which facilitates the proliferation of child pornography and enables predators to get in touch with children, shouldn't. That all seems fairly self-evident, actually. I'm not sure where you spend most of your time such that you think people don't think child pornography is a problem and that only zealots care about it. What a weird place that must be.
> Likewise
Yet you came back to respond again. Either engage in a conversation honestly or fuck off.
Again, the person you originally were talking to about this and myself have pointed out that it's not just Facebook's problem, it's society's problem, and all I have said is that there are tradeoffs, which you deny for inexplicable reasons (probably because you have no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to correct that assumption).
In a similar vein, I asked you what specifically you'd like Facebook to do, and you didn't have any meaningful answer (probably because you have no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to correct that assumption).
> I did, you asked me to and didn't respond.
Why does this thread end with my question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47987893
Where is your comment where you've defined these basic words and got no response?
> Oh, excuse me, not everyone, just "basically everyone else on earth". Again, incredibly dishonest on your part.
I'll restate to "basically everyone on earth with a clue about the differences between centralized and distributed systems".
> There's nothing ill-defined about my stance. It's very clear. Meta should clean up its child porn mess,
The first obvious question is: How (what is the definition of "clean up")? The obvious question after that is: If they do so, where do the pedos go next, because Facebook didn't create their interest in child porn? The obvious question after that is: Is that better than the status quo?
Yet you have literally no comment on this. Why are you so adamant about your position when it's apparently so uninformed?
> Well, I think it's incredibly disingenuous to act as if the only reason one could come to such belief is because of an extreme opinion. I'm willing to bet you that most people would agree with me that Facebook should do something meaningful about its child porn problem.
See the link above where I asked you to define meaningful and you didn't respond. They aren't doing nothing now from what I can tell, and they certainly could be doing more, to the point of shutting down their service entirely. What is "meaningful" to you?
> For no discernible reason you jumped to the conclusion that what I stated is an extreme opinion only shared by zealots. I'd bet most parents would agree. I'd bet most people would agree. In fact, you haven't at all explained what is extreme about that opinion. I think most people think child pornography is a problem, and I think most people think that Facebook, a website which facilitates the proliferation of child pornography and enables predators to get in touch with children, shouldn't. That all seems fairly self-evident, actually. I'm not sure where you spend most of your time such that you think people don't think child pornography is a problem and that only zealots care about it. What a weird place that must be.
I live in a world where Facebook is used for a lot of things, just like every other service on the internet, recognize that those services are far from the root cause of any issue related to the creation or distribution of undesirable content, understand that they are not able to solve the root cause, and that the only way for them to fully eradicate any specific type of content from their service is to shut it down, with the end state being no internet once this is applied to all services that host content.
If you see that state as acceptable or desirable, then just come out and say so. If not, then you need to accept that online services will end up hosting some objectionable content at some point. You rejected both of these options previously when stated slightly differently, and have yet to describe a third state that must exist for that rejection is valid, which is what leads to believe you might be some sort of zealot (as they are known for rejecting reality). Feel free to describe why this rejection of the only two option I'm aware of is valid at any time, beyond just saying "Facebook needs to do more".
> Yet you came back to respond again. Either engage in a conversation honestly or fuck off.
You could start by sharing a coherent thought beyond "Facebook bad" on this topic. I've presented numerous comments and questions that have gone unanswered.
There's nothing incoherent about that thought, which is also not what I expressed anyway. It's not my burden to solve Facebook's problem just because I pointed out that it should be solved. The proposition that it is my burden is, again, ridiculous.
>Why does this thread end with my question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47987893
It doesn't. It ends with me providing the common definition of meaningful, which is apparently something you were otherwise incapable of determining yourself?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009016
>I'll restate to "basically everyone on earth with a clue about the differences between centralized and distributed systems".
Hah. It'd be funny if it were intentional on your part.
>In a similar vein, I asked you what specifically you'd like Facebook to do, and you didn't have any meaningful answer (probably because you have no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to correct that assumption).
What don't I know about?
> The first obvious question is: How (what is the definition of "clean up")? The obvious question after that is: If they do so, where do the pedos go next, because Facebook didn't create their interest in child porn? The obvious question after that is: Is that better than the status quo?
Oh so you are making the exact argument you just said you weren't? Okay. Not going to bother because none of that is a reason why Facebook shouldn't "clean up" their problem. What do I mean by clean up? Again, make an impactful change on the ability for predators to interact with children and distribute child pornography on their platforms. You act as if I'm the only person in the world making this criticism, it's a bit bizarre. Here's some material for you that I found with 3 seconds of using Google (because, again, you apparently can't?):
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202601/meta-pledges-complian...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67640177
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39187929
https://childhood.org/news/facebook-a-hidden-marketplace-for...
> I live in a world where Facebook is used for a lot of things, just like every other service on the internet, recognize that those services are far from the root cause of any issue related to the creation or distribution of undesirable content, understand that they are not able to solve the root cause, and that the only way for them to fully eradicate any specific type of content from their service is to shut it down, with the end state being no internet once this is applied to all services that host content.
Facebook does not have to solve the root problem of child pornography. No one suggested that they did. This is a total strawman argument. Again, if you're going to be dishonest, disingenuous, and frankly just rude, please don't bother responding to me as you previously insisted you would.
> You rejected both of these options previously when stated slightly differently
No, I didn't. I never suggested that there was a world where Facebook would have absolutely zero amounts of child porn or predators or facilitating their actions. It's so weird how you keep making up arguments to knock down.
Your post was marked as dead by the mods, and I didn't have deadlinks enabled. I'm glad we now have external confirmation that you are commenting in bad faith and the substance of your comments is obnoxious and useless enough that this site hides some of them by default.
I think that's a good ending point for this thread, because you have absolutely nothing of substance to say on any topic remotely related to technology. I'm betting you're a lawyer?
It doesn't matter how many are shared but how many are viewed. On a small server community policing works just fine, bad actors are easier and faster to block and to top it off, the smaller reach of each server makes it unprofitable to target multiple serves, fish for their weak points. etc - the dirty jobs become unprofitable which is what matters most.
With the help of AI, small players can do a better job at removing CSAM.
Chicken/egg. How do you expect that AI to be able to detect CSAM without appropriate training, which requires appropriately classified training data?
Different situation.
Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation.
And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down version) People were nailing obscene things to bulletin boards for all recorded history.
---
In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
The downside would be "worse LLMs" or "LLMs being created later", which is a perfectly acceptable compromise.
---
This is not to say that genuine content flagging firms have no reason to curate such data & build tools to automatically flag content before human moderators have to. (But then they also shouldn't be outsourcing this and traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
But OpenAI is not such a firm. It's a general AI company.
Is there an hourly rate at which this should be acceptable?
^ i originally said "triage doctors" but i meant the resident ER doc.
The current support systems for police in this subject are already insufficient. Facebook's treatment of their moderation staff is abhorrent. The point of including the pay figure is to further illustrate just how damning this subcontracting practice is.
Not only is there an acceptable market rate for trauma, it’s sometimes competitive and requires licensing.
First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
I'm not discounting your point about high rates of suicide either. If anything, when you take away any good days, you're left, as a content moderator, with just seeing the worst of the world day in, day out, with nothing to make it meaningful. I'd suggest that's something we as a society should not tolerate as being an acceptable trade for the ability to share cat photos.
You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
Do you think miners mining is saving lives in the same way that doctors saving lives is saving lives?
To continue the parents point, do you think miners derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offer some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally?
And I think what prevents miners to "derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offset some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally" is not anything inherent in their work, but people thinking that only direct affect should be prestigious and satisfying and underapreciating the thankless background work to keep the lights on.
Same way people sneer at cleaning people or teachers and their meagre salaries and no respect, or domestic labor.
You are just too priviledge to understand people: many people would be glad do do it for the minimum wage, I would fight to have that oportunity (I live in west EU).
They have access to better counselling and are ostensibly trained for the job. But there are still suicides.
The core Facebook product is users' posts. It's not possible to separate those two. Nor can one downscale Facebook in a way that stops the problem; The aforementioned "Facebook has had this problem because it's a problem we've had since the medieval days of a town bulletin board"
With OpenAI, the way ChatGPT was built and user submissions are separate things. The GPT models could have been have been trained without this mess. OpenAI could be more selective in what data it scrapes.
While OpenAI cannot stop users sending god knows what in their prompt text and images, OpenAI can choose to not interact with that data beyond the minimum legal retention, by e.g. not using it for training the next generation of models. This would massively downscale the problem.
AI output is another such problem, where A) Maybe this'd be less of a problem if they didn't recklessly include a bunch of CSAM into the training data by accident, and B) LLMs just aren't the kind of fundamental human right that "having a public opinion" is. It would be fine if they were less good, invented years later, or even not invented at all.
The main counterargument to the latter has been the "But China is inventing evil AI" spiel, which is fairly weak. If China builds an orphaned baby crushing machine, we do not need to build an orphaned baby crushing machine of our own. (And the reality is that China is only chasing AI so aggressively because the west does. They're reasonable people, it would have been entirely possible for both the west and China to make a mutual "no orphan crushing" agreement and just accept slower rollout of technology. This is exactly what has been done with human genetic engineering, and China did in fact enforce these norms.)
This is of course incredibly illegal, but megacorps (by valuation) and oligarchy members are above the law so who cares. I assume there could be a regulatory framework which can make this legal for an extremely specific purpose, but there is zero change that OpenAI was part of this/abiding by this in 2022, absolutely none.
You've just thrown the garbage over your fence. Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.
At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.
Any website that allows user to upload videos needs some sort of service that can identify and report CSAM.
I guess that they process billions of images every day.
I don’t think they’re getting csam from scraping (thankfully, I expect there isnt much publicly available csam).
They aren’t as big as facebook, but they must have this functionality or many users will be hurt.
Westeners are too expensive and unwilling to do it. AI is a business model that requires poverty and extreme inequality to function. Yes other businesses do that too, but they don't claim it's a solution to everything while it actually has very special human requirements.
Granted the latter is kinda happening distantly on YouTube where you can’t talk about “ suicide “ so everyone self censors…
There are more reasons why these jobs are located in developing countries, it's not only the price of labour. Imagine for a second, these annotations would have to be done in the US. The public outrage would probably be audible across the Atlantic. This is another form of imperialism.
you must be extremy priviledge to think that way, even as EU I would be glad to do it for the minimum salary. For your info, a terrible job for most human is a job that is extremly hard physically at the point of destroying your health. That said, like many people, I would find it much more interesting than many boring job. [If someone read this, please hire me for this, in exchange I would work the 5 first hour for free]
If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.
Safety and user pain is a part of tech which seems largely ignored, even on sites like HN.
I really have no idea why this ignorance prevails; commenters seem to genuinely be unaware of what goes on in Trust and Safety processes.
I mean, most users would complain about content moderation, but their experience would be miles ahead of what most of humanity enjoys when it comes to responsiveness.
I believe this lack of knowledge, examples, and case history is causing a blind spot in tech centric conversations when it comes to the causes of the Techlash.
Unfortunately this backlash is also the perfect cover for authoritarian government action - they come across as responsive to voters while also reigning in firms that are more responsive to American citizens and government officers than their own.
But it's not really a fascism thing. While fascism does love the oppression of women, and the current crop of fascists have a notable connection to the Epstein case, this is a lot more boring.
Sam Altman's not a fascist, he's a wet noodle who sucks up to the Trump administration for money. He's not even good at it. The way his company handled CSAM does cast aspersions on Altman & the accusations from his sister, but all other evidence suggests he's just a moron acting recklessly. Not identifying the problem ahead of time, and acting poorly in response.
In the case of Meta. We know who Zuckerberg is. The company got it's start as, in crude terms, a sex pest website. The original "Facemash" website forcibly taken down by Harvard. This is not some new consequence of this turn to fascism, Zuckerberg's always been like this, and the actions taken against him were clearly not enough to avoid the company culture following his precedent.
Disagree, not on average. There was a non-trivially higher % of decisions made based on "what's good for the customer" or "what's good for the product" or "I would be ashamed to do this" and a lower % of decisions made based on "what maximizes profit in the next quarter". I think that is more ethical. To take it to an extreme, using slave labor because it's good for the customer is more ethical than using slave labor to maximize profit in the next quarter.