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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
So these contractors went all the way to Varadkar for minor inconveniences at their job, essentially internal disputes?
Upset about not getting the same perks as other employees?
Signing restrictive NDAs for a job with exposure to extremely sensitive company processes and customer data?
The more I read about these stories, the more I’m inclined to believe Haidt’s “Coddled Mind” and Turchin’s “Elite Overproduction” theories as the root of much of the problems we’re facing in the west today.
Is this a willful misreading? The "perk" mentioned is WFH during a pandemic. The mental health concerns in question are due to viewing extremely graphic content, not at all along the lines of the ridiculous "safe spaces" Haidt's book concerns itself with.
Due to current covid-19 restrictions in Ireland, as a result of briefly having the world's highest per capita cases in early january, the government's policy is:
> Only essential workers should travel to work. You should work from home unless you are providing an essential service and need to be physically present.
Facebook content moderation is unlikely to fall under "essential work" which is more concerned about healthcare, retail necessities (food/drink/medicine/cleaning supplies), and infrastructure. Given that they've pointed out moderators elsewhere can work from home, it's likely facebook cannot demonstrate that they need to be physically present to perform the work.
So yes, it is a matter for the government to get involved in if Facebook or its subcontractors are not complying.
As for Varadkar, getting involved is likely due to the fact this falls under his department's remit (as minister of enterprise), not his position as Tanaiste. But getting _personally_ involved is likely Leo looking for a good PR opportunity rather than the facebook employees insisting on the Tanaiste's personal attention. Or maybe he's just also their local TD, since his constituency is Dublin West where many people in Facebook offices in Dublin likely live.
Some jobs should be paid more. An example is shop workers who are front line during the pandemic and exposing themselves to covid-19 while higher paid people get to work from home. The problem is that it is seen as a low skill job. Same for content moderators. So should they be paid more? Arguably. Will they? Probably not.
They don't even need to create a new social network. If they want FTE benefits of a specific company. They could always, you know, apply and clear the interview.
Create an AI which understands the intent of a piece of content then.
Moderation is the job of editors and journalists being lost to social media and the internet.
All those millions of local news papers and reporters who had to make judgement calls on whether some content should be displayed, or whether it was not newsworthy?
That is part of what content moderation is, that process debt that SM firms don't want to pay for.
Their suggestion of creating a brand new competing social media network is not a realistic solution to Facebook treating its workers badly. Your suggestion of just creating some AI to do all the work is similarly unrealistic.
This is purely because of exploitation - people work those jobs to guarantee themselves shelter, food and warmth.
If we (as a society) guaranteed everybody enough resources to live, those types of jobs would need to be paid a more appropriate rate, including hazard pay.
Even if we presuppose that everyone working could choose not to work at all, I think your scenario is overly idealistic.
What your scenario changes is that the labor supply gets to be much more selective about the job they take. Supply and demand still exist. Moderating facebook is still a low skill desk job. The pay and benefit floor may be raised across the board, but I don't see what the market force would separate moderating facebook from the other jobs with comparable pay today.
Sure, you could quit a job moderating facebook and not have to worry about keeping yourself solvent. But the same goes for every other job. What would separate them from the jobs that they're on the same level with today?
> What would separate them from the jobs that they're on the same level with today?
I'm imagining jobs with (for example) a high emotional toll, disgust factor, risk factor.
I believe those aspects are presently undervalued (described above as jobs which "anyone can do"), so I imagine there would be a reassessment of how those tasks are valued. They would likely require relatively higher pay before people were willing to do them.
Jobs with generally poor working conditions, or a high degree of managerial control and low autonomy, could be re-factored into jobs with better working conditions, as people are more able to be selective on that basis.
The thing is not many people want to do this kind of charity.
The only way to solve this is to develop a technology that is advanced enough and cheap enough that everybody can guarantee themselves shelter, food, warmth without any other human involved.
> everybody can guarantee themselves shelter, food, warmth without any other human involved.
I was also going to mention that this is actively prevented by modern society. In practice, you cannot forge these things by yourself, as you will soon be stopped by private landownership.
I'm not sure, the trend is energy become cheaper and cheaper and technology become more advanced every time.
I imagine technology that some day advance enough and autonomous enough and cheap enough that enable me to live off the grid with supply of unlimited solar energy and robot that can make me food.
The only thing that can fix society is to have no society.
> If we (as a society) guaranteed everybody enough resources to live
That would do really weird economic things because either money would have to be something you really want since your basic needs are already covered, or the job would have to be very rewarding because you can basically choose not to go into work arbitrarily.
There's no "we as society" that can just magically "provide the resources". The resources must happen, i.e. somebody actually needs to do the work. In other words, it's someone's job. There is no feasible way to run a society without people doing the work. In fact, the pandemic has been a good example of this, on so many levels - farmers in UK complaining that the strawberries are going to rot on the fields without immigrant labour (because of border lockdowns), shops almost running out of food (because of supply chain breakdowns, which governments took a lot of effort to protect/reestablish), mask & PPE shortages (because there's not enough people doing the work in factories - particularly in Europe), food deliveries (i.e. someone needs to actually do the work of getting in a car and driving around), ...
Giving people sufficient basic resources for survival doesn't stop them from working.
Everyone being paid more than a living wage is already choosing to do more work than they have to. Why do you assume that people would stop working, if they have a choice? It's already evident that people choose to work without coercion, if they are paid properly.
My point is that coercion via threat of personal destitution is bad and should be eliminated, not that work is bad.
Even if prices rose with everyone guaranteed resources, why would anyone get off their asses to shovel shit when they can sit at home and get paid basically the same?
This is a sort of complete miunderstanding of how your world works. Utterly.
People work for incentives. People on HN work on their startups - why?
They could get a SW job and leave the stress behind, why do they have to struggle?
Some people will take the basics and be happy - thats their call. MANY others will do what it takes to get paid because that is what they want.
So if you aren't getting enough fruit pickers, well pay more. If apparently your going rate isn't high enough, well then those strawberries are perhaps not economically viable in the first place, since no one in your economy wants to do that work.
Obviously its a lot more complex, but the essence of economics is always - people act according to incentives.
Because prices would be so high that you would be unable to pay rent or eat on your monthly “allowance”. You could keep raising the allowance every month and things would soon spiral out of control
This assumes that large landowners and food conglomerates are 100% rentiers.
That the money they make is based on the amount they can extract, and not on the value they provide. You're describing a system which is not democratic capitalism, it is serfdom.
If that were the case, why would we continue to allow that?
That still doesn’t mean it is exploitation. One person has no inherent right to shelter, food and warmth. If someone decides to give it to them, that is charity.
This sounds incredibly heartless – even cruel – to me. I'm sorry, but I can't put it any other way.
I'd like to think that we can transcend "survival of the fittest" just a little bit. Besides, you never know if you might need some help from others for shelter, food, or warmth in the future.
What is your point? We live in a society and we're stuck with each other. We need some rules to organize this. It can't work on a "if I feel like it"-basis.
> Giving people shelter costs other people time and work. How will you pay for that?
We've been doing this kind of thing since modern humans evolved (actually, probably longer). It's just the society got larger and got organized in to nations.
I was curious about that; it is in Article 25 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services ..."
And this is why I have a problem with the UN declaration of human rights.If I choose to live on a Sandune in the middle of the Sahara, Who’s obligation is it to ensure these services are provided to me.That said, I would say it’s a reasonable aspiration for society to be structured in a way that this is achievable for people that want to work for it or can’t work for it, but not a right
There are negative rights and positive rights.
The former is freedom from other humans doing things to and the second is requires other humans to do something for you.
I believe that only negative rights are and can be inherent.
You can build social contracts that help people get services and materials on top of this, because people care about each other.
I agree, but this is a matter of semantics.
There is nothing in the physical universe that supports morality.
Rights are components of a moral framework, inherently philosophical - unless you believe in a god. When someone says something IS a right, they are really saying "This is a fundamental assumption in the moral framework I believe to describe a just world"
You can look back historically to answer that question in many ways. One common answer had to do with organizing, managing, and controlling people for the benefit of an elite ruling class. Which is still a reasonable description of e.g. US society today.
Much of Chomsky's writing is concerned with such topics, e.g. https://truthout.org/articles/us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-... , which makes the point that the notion of an elite guardian class goes back to the founding of the US, and it in turn was based on ideas inherited from monarchies.
I think the other posters comment is a pretty pessimistic take. Humans are inherently tribal and a banded together since before we existed as a species. This wasn’t for the advantage of top animal. It offered protection, Stability, and a way to raise young in this environment. Higher primates will share food when they have access but aren’t communes.I would posit that most historic human societies serve the same function. They provide protection from external threats and stabilize chaotic environment. Peasants received protection from their Lords in exchange for taxes. Looking into more recent human history of the US government served much the same function. There was no redistribution of wealth, and no income taxes until they were added on to fund World War I. The idea that governments acting on behalf of society have the goal of Supporting the poor is a relatively new development. National healthcare insurance was largely a development after World War II, and for most of the countries, support of the poor was handled through private charity until late In the 20th century
I was giving a pervasive example of how "looking after everyone in society" has often not really been the main goal of societies. This is consistent with what you wrote, "The idea that governments acting on behalf of society have the goal of supporting the poor is a relatively new development."
> Humans are inherently tribal and a banded together since before we existed as a species. This wasn’t for the advantage of top animal.
Modern governments are not tribal societies, though. As I've observed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997576 , the Communist Manifesto Ch. 1 opens with the sentence, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," but adds a footnote about this referring to written history, i.e. history of post-tribal civilizations.
> I would posit that most historic human societies serve the same function.
Perhaps to some extent, but to help disabuse yourself of the notion of the benevolence of the ruling class in this respect, some of the references in my comment linked above might help. In particular, what Chomsky has to say about the elite "guardian class" in the US: https://truthout.org/articles/us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-...
The job market is not a natural phenomenon like gravity. It is essentially a societal construct already subject to regulation. If it produces outcomes we - its builders and participants - don't like, we can change it. It's true that supply and demand will always be factors, but we can set boundaries.
I'm not proposing any particular change here myself, i just want to push back against that fatalistic attitude.
> Jobs are also paid according to the danger they pose
Only because it's a function of limiting supply (of willing labor). High danger means fewer people willing to do it, which means it pays more to attract willing candidates.
If there are still a ton of willing candidates, you don't get paid extra because you think it's dangerous work.
Crime scene cleaning pays more than normal janitor jobs, not because the work is harder but because there is emotional labour beyond the simple job.
You need to consider the effects of work on employees bodies and minds.
There is skill to be treated like a serf for a living and smiling to your masters who claim your labour is low skilled and not deserving of a fair (living) wage.
More specifically, there are fewer people willing or able to do crime scene cleaning than normal janitorial work. That drives the price up. Simple supply and demand explain it quite well.
Have you ever thought that maybe the particular subcontracting group you seem to know so well doesnt represent the entirety of FB mods as a job? You seem strangely adamant that this is no big deal, while ignoring the many reports we've heard over the years of the kind of very bad stuff mods have had to deal with, regardless of your anecdotal experience.
Also, on AI classifiers, I think there are far too many nuanced situations to completely replace mods, and your comment about this is very hand-wavy, and even if you are right, we still need to deal with the problems we have now, not defer them by saying there will be a solution in the future.
I am just saying what I heard. Maybe it is AI, maybe it is handled in different office. This company is bussiness oriented, does tech support in multiple languages in large openspace fish bowl. It would be weird to restore passwords on one table, and watch violence on next table.
But I am sure many of them would take this work for a bit of extra money. There are people from Middle East, Ukraine, Romania... We had millions refugees passing through Athens just a few years ago. Reality is simply very different here.
People post things like beheadings, all sorts of sexual assault (including sexual assault on children), and so forth. It's not just underboobs and dickpics.
Yes, like you said, there is brutal violence and child sexual assault material (CSAM) that moderators have to view. I worked at a non-profit to which Facebook, et. al are required to submit CSAM once detected on their platform. It's been a few years, but the quantity of content submitted from Facebook was truly disturbing.
People I know do not deal with this type of stuff. Maybe it is AI progress, maybe it is handled somewhere else.
But for $35k/year you would find here many people with great english and university education. And life skills to handle this, for example former police officer.
Adult nudity is 0.05%-0.06% of all content views. That is the same rate for violent and graphic content. This means people somewhere, are going through millions of pictures of graphic violence.
You could simply be dealing with the lucky team which just has to watch schlongs.
If you are a contractor you don't work for FB. You work for either a separate company or your personal one.
There's nothing to stop these people from starting their own moderation company that provides all the services they're demanding. Then they should lobby FB to use this company instead.
I have spent a total of 30 minutes of my life on Facebook, looking at a friends feed (I never had an account). There is always a few people who use the platform to express themselves in the most horrible way. 30 minutes were enough for me, there are many crazies out there using the platform for unamicable purposes. No way the moderators worst case is soft pork, unless they are only looking at flagged posts. I am not sure why people think they need the platform to "keep in touch with friends" . What happened to a good old call or a WhatsApp message or god forbid, meet in person.
And 30 minutes is a pretty short period to get a representative sample of a service used by billions for many different activities (messaging, video calls, hobby groups, marketplace). The 'feed' that you scroll through is definitely a mixed bag, but Facebook has added focus to more specific and niche apps over time.
For my family we use Facebook because it is cross platform (25 people, several with Android, most with iPhone, and some that like to use it by web), everyone already has an account (ages from 25 to 65), and the quality of the service is high and consistent for both messages and video calls. We frequently do a video call with all members of the family across many devices and 'it just works'.}
Also, meeting in person hasn't really been 'allowed' in almost a year. #covid19
