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.'"
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?
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.
I wonder if their moderators ever run into trouble with the local authorities because of the material they are accessing?
If your job is to review an endless stream of too-nasty-for-facebook stuff, and you live in a slightly puritanical jurisdiction, I imagine that you could relatively easily end up handling a fair amount of material that is theoretically illegal, if not necessarily well enforced(and, unlike the higher-ups at facebook HQ, who probably benefit from the 'obviously, we are just screening material in order to hand over anything wicked to the cops' presumption, it might not be easy for Joe Temp to prove that he is just doing his job)...
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.
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 [...]."
Welcome to the future, brought to you by free trade agreements and completely intended consequences.
FTFY.
Arguments in favor of completely removing all tariffs on Chinese imports occurred in the 1980's and were passed in the 1990's. Then Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers was giving talks about how globalization ought to be applauded because it made things more efficient (i.e. cheaper) and how it would ultimately benefit Americans because they could pay 15 cents for stuff at Walmart that used to cost 85 cents at the local general store. Both parties were all in favor of increasing the number of available H1B visas, and for making the process convoluted enough that large American firms would have the "efficiency" of hiring people who couldn't make a fuss about low pay or working conditions without risking getting deported, while the smaller firms couldn't jump through the necessary hoops.
This wasn't an accident or an unintended consequence - it was the direct and stated goal of the economic policies of George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama.
I am officially gone from
I used to work at a Moderation company in Australia processing similar pictures/text to this. This was an issue that came up regularly but which we couldn't get an answer from our legal team.
The general issues are:
-We had to view blatantly illegal material in the line of our job.
-The servers were often in the USA/Europe, so the company technically transported child porn across international borders. (unencrypted no less)
-Even after it's been marked as illegal, action taken, and maybe even sent to the authorities, the original copy is not deleted. It's marked as deleted but still stored in that big old database.
-Police forces around the world want you to keep a copy. If a user posts illegal material, the police want a copy of it. If the police request information about somebody after they bust a child porn ring, saying 'we wipe everything illegal - sorry!' just doesn't cut it.
If authorities combed through their picture database, they'd find tens of thousands of illegal to own that have been transported across borders. IANAL, but it does sound very tricky.
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.
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.