Slashdot Mirror
The Worst Job In the Digital World
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports on one of the worst jobs in the digital world — moderating photos and posts on Facebook and other social networking sites flagged as unsuitable by other users. Last year Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid $1 an hour. 'It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,' says Derkaoui. 'And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.' Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. 'Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc,' says one. 'I left [because] I value my sanity.' Facebook's one-page cheat sheet lays out exactly what must be confirmed and deleted by the team. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities. Emma Barnett adds that although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users' personal details. 'Maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their "friends" – only to find that two minutes later it's being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.'"
I thought the worst job in the world was digitally editing all of those pics of 'Octo-mom' so she only looked like she has 4 appendages instead of 8.
So the moral of the story is that you have no idea who could be reading what you posted to Facebook, and that privacy controls are completely meaningless when it comes to Facebook employees reading through your information? How is that news?
Palm trees and 8
A wizard wheeze would be to flag pictures of landscapes and kittens - let's give them something nice to view for a change instead of the facebook equivalent of rottencom?
"foreplay allowed.... even for same sex (man-man/woman-woman)" - I'm glad they clarified that...
I've read articles about this job before, but those reported on centres in the US where employees are given counselling to cope with the job. Is Facebook avoiding this moral duty by farming it out abroad?
Are the moderators at least provided with a health insurance package that will pay for the eyebleach?
Welcome to the face of globalization, where the rush to the bottom has given us jobs that pay only 1/10 of a McJob.
We've already seen this with programers. If it's in an O'Reilly book, it will be outsourced, crowd-sourced, off-shored, whatever it takes to drive the cost to as near to zero as possible.
Welcome to the future, brought to you by the internet and the law of unintended consequences.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I had a grad school friend with a similar job at Photobucket in Denver. They had similar no-nudity policies to Facebook but were slightly more permissive about violence. Said roommate was pretty sick of it after 3 months of having to click REJECT for images of breastfeeding and ACCEPT on videos of curb-stomping. On the bright side, when she joined the military she was one of the only recruits not to bat an eyelash when they showed them "this is your brain on IEDs" imagery.
drugs (apart from marijuana) ... are all banned
Personally I think that aspirin should be allowed too, but I guess I'm a bit of a radical.
then you don't deserve any privacy to begin with.
did you forget to take your meds?
I do hope that you didn't end up accusing a poor bestiality enthusiast of being a spammer...
Bestiality may be distasteful, controversial, and potentially unethical; but spamming is just plain evil.
I work for a company that is outsourced by one of the bigger news sites here in Poland and, although I only moderate comments on news items, i can fully confirm that this is one of the worst jobs you can have. Sure, we work shifts, so we have some limited control over whether we have to get up early in the morning or work nights (four this month for me), but the pay is ridiculous (about 330$ a month - lowest legally allowed pay grade in Poland) and the amount of work is sometimes staggering. But that isn't really the problem.
The problem is the kind of shit you have to sift through. I mean, sure, I'm used to dickheads on the 'net, but this is the biggest, saddest collection of misanthropes I've ever seen - not even 4chan comes close (i used to be a regular lurker, stopped some time around the Habbo raids). This being people of my nationality adds further injury and shame. But dickheads being dickheads, there isn't really a lot to tell - we all know or met them at some point. But then there are the special ones. Let's evaluate the most popular personalities:
1. The hyper-national. Everything Polish is good, everything not-Polish is bad. Uses terms like "True Pole", throws a shit-fit every time someone calls him on his no-true-scotsman nature. Accuses everyone of being either a traitor (favourite target: emmigrants) or an SB Agent.
2. The religious fanatic. Every news item is his private piece for preaching and he enjoys lambasting people for "not keeping the faith". His favourite are scientific, astronomic and health-related items.
3. The armchair politic. Knows everything there is to know about the complex social and geopolitical problems the world faces and offers simple, one-point solutions to every one of them. Rages uncontrollably when someone offers a counter-argument, not to mention when he is proven wrong.
4. The racist/antisemite. Every negative event in the world is caused by Jews and they're all secretly plotting to make us their cattle to be used and abused as they see fit. Frequently cites the faked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, uses crappy YouTube movies with no sources, or indeed any truth in them, to "prove" his point. Everyone disagreeing with him is either a Jew or their pawn.
These are just the most basic sampling of commenters, but when thrown all together, we get a critical mass, which I then have to clean up. Every news item becomes a political battlefield between the commenters, even purely scientifical ones. And they resort to such underhanded tactics in insulting one another that sometimes you just sit there, looking at a post and wonder what kind of a person could come up with this.
After working here half a year, I'm beginning to have a hard time telling sarcasm apart, and my cynicism shot way up. It's not apocalyptic to my sanity yet, but I already feel the influence. God help me if I ever will be transfered to monitor user-uploaded material (photos).
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
It's surprising the number of devs you hear joking about seeing "JB"... A bunch of 20-something guys with unlimited access to much of the worlds "private" pictures, isn't always a great idea...
"Urine, feces, vomit, semen, pus, and ear wax "
Seriously? Lot of ear-wax fetishists out there, to the point they need a rule banning its depiction?
"Crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing"
Because, y'know, a completely flattened dead cat ("Deep flesh wounds are ok to show") couldn't possibly offend anyone, while showing a packet of chicken livers at the grocery store borders on mass-murderer territory?
"Maps of Kurdistan (Turkey)"
Just - What? And this counts as an "escalated" offense? Hell, the entire "IP Blocks" section pretty much reads like the antithesis of Facebook's sole positive contribution to society - Its ability to help organize people against their governments.
I think I need to go make a facebook page full of flattened dead cats - All named Ataturk, whatever the hell that means.
I see I have several mod points here on Slashdot today! And I don't even get $1/hour! Can I get a pay raise? I refuse to moderate this story thread until I do!
Once what you wrote or sent floats over to that little magic box and goes down the copper wire, you might as well be carving it on the surface of the moon in ten mile high letters of fire. Assume that everybody in the world can see it, immediately and forever after.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
there's plenty o'people would do it for free
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You've never browsed Slashdot at -1, I see. The mods on here who keep the depravity out of honest, law abiding peoples sight don't even get paid minimum wage, it's an outrage.
From TFA:
which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities
Surely the californian employee who only gets to see the very worst of these pictures every day must have a worse job than the people who also get to filter all the nice pictures.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Next time you go on Facebook, find some nice photos of flowers, landscapes, birds and butterflies, and flag them as "unsuitable". Give these people something nice to look at for a change.
False premise. The employer also has the option of figuring out a way to increase that same job's productivity so that it now becomes profitable to hire someone at the higher wage.
For example, introducing air conditioning into assembly plants can increase productivity AND reduce defects, and save more than enough money to offset the cost of AC, leaving more money for wages.
Investing in more training and things like feedback circles can show similar increases.
Putting in a system so workers are rewarded for suggestions that are adopted will pay back more than the cost of the rewards paid out, while increasing the business' competitiveness, again allowing for higher wages and higher profits.
The higher the minimum wage, the more incentive there is to increase productivity rather than treat people as a source of cheap labour - in other words, the higher the minimum wage, the more productive a business is per worker.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
This was an unofficial duty that I had while working third shift at a web hosts - Granted, it was more researching complaints of abuse as well as law enforcement requests, but there were many users who had forum software that would get "overrun" with rather graphical posts. The company basically contracted out moderation services to these customers, and passed it off to third shift - We were to patrol these forums, and deal with objectionable content. Now, we didn't get $1 an hour, we DID at least get something that barely beat unemployment, but it still wasn't enough given the effect that the job had.
There were funnier sides to this, though.
We didn't have any great spam controls at the time other than PCRE filters... So one job was going through the hostmaster/postmaster emailboxes, and looking for spam patterns, and creating rules around them. The problem became how to prevent spam without blocking legitimate email that may be mentioning viagra or fisting. Having your female boss walk into a conversation in which you are discussing the fact that someone could legitimately be sending an email with the subject line of "fisting sluts" is always a good time.
Also, they wanted to launch an international video dating website - this was pretty early on, when the tech was new. Pretty standard dating site stuff at the time, except you could record your own video to include with it, with some "cutting-edge" webcam app. These videos had to be approved before they went live. And that job went to? Yep, me. I handled most of the backend server work and some custom PHP code, and this was my reward - Moderation.
This drove home a fundamental difference in how the genders handled dating sites at the time... The womens ads were generally approved, as they were almost always very tasteful- Fully clothed full body views, or simply a talking head, while they talked a bit about themselves, their interests, and what they want in a partner. This was what we encouraged, and was in accordance with guidelines. This part wasn't so bad - You got to hear a lot of fun stories from different cultures at best, and at worst, it would be in a language you didn't understand.
Now, that was the women. The men? Sure, they talked about themselves the same way, and had the same distribution of stories, but the overwhelming majority of the video was unclothed lower torso at best, and feverishly masturbating at worst. This was not a small percentage, it was BY FAR the majority. There's something seriously bizzare about hearing someone talk about loving walks on the beach or whatever, while there's a camera focused on an erection.
So that was third shift - click, penis, reject. click, pantless sweaty guy, reject. click, tasteful ad, approve. click, fat hairy abdomen and rapid motion, reject, and now eye bleach. And so on.
It was that and the spam filtering for the majority of third shift - A good solid 9 hours of offensive imagery, spam headers and penii, which lead to a rather warped view of the world outside of work.