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Facebook Is Not Protecting Content Moderators From Mental Trauma, Lawsuit Claims (reuters.com)
A former Facebook contract employee has filed a lawsuit, alleging that content moderators who face mental trauma after reviewing distressing images on the platform are not being properly protected by the social networking company. Reuters reports: Facebook moderators under contract are "bombarded" with "thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder," the lawsuit said. "Facebook is ignoring its duty to provide a safe workplace and instead creating a revolving door of contractors who are irreparably traumatized by what they witnessed on the job," Korey Nelson, a lawyer for former Facebook contract employee Selena Scola, said in a statement on Monday. Facebook in the past has said all of its content reviewers have access to mental health resources, including trained professionals onsite for both individual and group counseling, and they receive full health care benefits. More than 7,500 content reviewers work for Facebook, including full-time employees and contractors. Facebook's director of corporate communications, Bertie Thomson, said in response to the allegations: "We take the support of our content moderators incredibly seriously, [...] ensuring that every person reviewing Facebook content is offered psychological support and wellness resources."
A country of weaklings. If you don't think you can handle that shit (and I'm sure it is horrible) don't take the fucking job. Butch the fuck up.
If you sign up for moderating filth, you're surprised you're not getting a filth-free safe space to do that job in? Did they promise such when you signed up for the job, or what?
I'm waiting for a class action lawsuit of janitors objecting having to clean dirty toilets and not having a workspace "safe from germs" in which to do it.
It looks like it's time to call in a relief crew and let them get a rest. Call in the B Team -- or the /b/ team, rather.
You get all the best talent when they do it for free.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I've read that for the police officers who work combating child porn, there's stuff you can't unsee.
People who have to deal with that to keep the rest of us from seeing it should have reasonable resources and therapy available to deal with it. I'm not talking carte blanche, but something serious if they need it. Just because you can find someone to work a job without that support doesn't mean it's okay to mess people up for doing their job. You can find people to work a sawmill even if you don't give them health insurance if they cut off your hand, but it's still not okay.
So they now need content monitors for the content monitors? Until the content monitors' content monitors sue for their own content monitors. I foresee a problem here. At least until we train our nascent AI overlords by feeding them an endless stream of bestiality and beheading videos, then all our problems will be solved!
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/09/01
Thank you for reminding me of penny arcade.
I always fucking hated that site, and this one is a good reminder of how bad it was.
I guess those photos of a 30 year old professional model's nipples must be really traumatizing. That's why the model is suspended for 30 days because of the horror inflicted on the poor moderators.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Oh.... Facebook is still a thing. Nice.
Given that it is impossible to do what this disgruntled worker demands (which is to pre-filter the offensive content, that THEY are hired to filter!!), what I see happening instead is the addition of new job requirements...
So, Mr Smith. I assume that you have reviewed and agreed to our initial screening waiver while we administer the 4CHAN-Reddit test battery to determine your candidacy for this position-- are you ready to proceed?
Excellent! This equipment will measure your emotional responses to the images and other content in this test battery, which have been selected at random from some of the most infamous place on the internet, and which represent a sampling of the worst kind of content humans are able to produce. The test will last 30 minutes, after which, we will review your data and inform you if you have made our candidate list.
(Begin horror scene from A Clockwork Orange)
-----
You know, that kind of thing.
Should somebody else watch all videos and moderate them for the moderators? Apparently, logical thinking is not available to the ones complaining here...
Also, I very much doubt that much illegal content gets uploaded to Facebook, were it should be pretty easy to identify who did it. People getting traumatized by legal content, on the other hand, should not agree to do this job in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm asking for a friend...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When was the last time we learned something good about the people that run facebook, twitter, reddit or amazon ?
Them REPs like to kill prisoners, so they...
Works both ways.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Facebook, who is it good for, except for the owner. :D
What could go wrong when someone who seems to be anti-social, created a "social" website.
L'Idiot
There's some people who must enjoy looking at this stuff (otherwise it wouldn't get posted), so why not just hire them?
Psychopaths need jobs too you know.
They put up with everything, don't ban random shit for no reason (except sometimes as a joke), and they sure as shit don't get mental illness from moderating.
That not even Indians can do everything. :-D
What about the poor people eho have to moderate videos with lawyers, politicians, Kardashians and reality TV?
Just think of the severe trauma suffered by people like me who have to listen to people wearing suits say words like synergy all the time?
I honestly feel nothing for anyone who is forced to see beastialty and child molestation when I have to see and hear MBAs and lawyers. I think they are all equally scaring... and to be fair... they probably were told about this going into the job... and they still chose to take a job watching child pornography... so suck it up or quit.
I thought they had those content moderators mostly in Philippines.
source: Vice: The Companies Cleaning the Deepest, Darkest Parts of Social Media
Law enforcement officers who work on child-pornography cases have their own specialized therapists. There's even a name for the stuff they face: Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder (STSD), brought on by repeatedly witnessing events that traumatize people.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if many Facebook mods needed this same kind of treatment, given the stuff they have to deal with. Hell; some Slashdot mods could probably use it.
When did people become so unable to deal with things? Must come from the helicopter parents who never wanted a single negative thing to happen to their kids. The world is not a Utopia of peace and calm and to accept this and move on is a much more healthy process then complaining that it needs to go away.
You've got to be kidding... I mean, you only use moderators that are cleared (psychologically) for being able to wacht those streams. You don't just put anybody on moderating content.
But if it pays better than my current (development) job, where can I sign up.. Still looking for content that really traumatises me, still haven't found it (PS. that doesn't mean I enjoy the content, it just means I'm not traumatized by it).
Maybe just inform the people before they upload videos that all videos are subject to review and illegal content will be submitted to law enforcement after which Facebook will do everything in their power to help prosecute you. Sure that will reduce the number of people caught doing bad things, but that's not Facebook's problem. They're under no obligation to police people.
Their news is pretty much completely uncensored. The evening news reporter is usually walking around a few dead bodies in the street, practically poking them to see if they are alive.
What about people who service sewers?
What about people who work in the ER?
What about people who work in combat zones?
Are the aforementioned able to "un-see" things more easily than content moderators? I seriously doubt it.
This whining, gold digging, ex-Facebook "moderator" needs more perspective.and to man-up.
What we need is prisoners who have committed the crimes depicted in the videos to be the ones doing the moderation. They won't need to be paid anything for their work, but take a month off their sentence for every 1,000 videos that are processed, something like that. If they've already committed the crime, they'll be quite desensitized already. Looking at a picture of murder would be mild if you're in the position to already know what that *smells* like.
Just match the crimes to the types of videos to be moderated. Murderer? You get the murder videos. Rapist? You'll be watching rapes from now on. Animal torturer? Guess what videos you'll be handling!
Who knows, maybe by exposing criminals to this content enough times, they'll get sick of it, too. Kinda like catching your teenager smoking, and making him smoke that entire pack of cigarettes in one sitting as punishment.
faceplant is mental trauma
Well, at last! this is a case where lining a first post to Goatse would actually have been informative and insightful. Accidentally opening something like tub girl is an eye scalding experience that rewires your brain as you try desperately to unsee it.
But how in the heck would you "protect" a moderator from this sort of thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Don't monitor content, problem solved.
Information wants to be free, any contrary efforts are ultimately doomed to fail.
Yes an unborn baby is just the same as someone convicted of rape and murder.
Exceptional logic. Don't forget to Pokemon GO! to the polls!
they look at that shit all day for fun already
Would you like to watch 5 hours straight of car accidents?
[Yawn]
What gets to me is having to read about AGW, UBI or "she won" over and over. Where's my trauma support?
Have gnu, will travel.
No, of course not. One is a human being, the other a parasite.
We just have different opinions on which is which.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This would be an ideal job for an expert system. Not the silly Google Assistant (or whatever it's called today), Alexa or Siri, which are good for grins and giggles, and little more. An expert system able to go over all those images and automatically discard the immense majority of the filth would be invaluable.
Buy job ads on rotten.com.
Employers have responsibilities to their direct employees.
Outside contractors have responsibilities to their own direct employees.
Facebook should have no legal obligations to the employees of contractors other than to limit exposure and to not expose them to dangerous things that are beyond the scope of their job. All the things they are complaining about are within the scope of their job.
Now, Facebook may have a moral responsibility to include in its contract that all contracting firms must provide psychological screening prior to placement, regular breaks, emergency/puke breaks as needed, and mental health care for their own employees.
Facebook would be wise to not hire independent contractors unless they first make sure the independent contractor had a note from a psychological professional stating that the person had a suitable psychological profile and that the person had access to psychological care when needed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
initial data point :
- minorities are less likely to possess an ID.
Logic in the US :
- it's racist to require an ID for voting as all the ID-less minorities won't have their voice heard.
(thus don't require ID for voting. But keep requiring ID for nearly everything else in life, and ID-less minorities are still having problems with all these other activities).
Logic in nearly everywhere :
- if ID is such an important thing for so many critical actions (getting a job, among other), maybe we should try to find ways to make it easier for minorities to actually get one ?
- alternatively : make sure to provide free voter-ID to anyone who wants to vote (and that document can also double as a make-shift ID in lots of critical cases).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Better than the which from Yellow Brick Road, Hillary. You do know that was her in the movie right?
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Facebook should hire more /b/tards.
Which then will cause the treshold for moderation to go way up, as the /b/tards simply don't understand what's the problem with videos of {GRAPHICAL_HORRIBLE_THING happening to cute innocent young girls}
You need somebody whose capability to register disturbing things hasn't been completely number by 4chan, if you want them to be still competent at noticing and moderating disturbing content.
I'm not even speaking about having empathy, just being still able to remember that nails have specifical place where they can go into and that usually doesn't cover much of the human body.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Which witch?
I wonder if there is a way to combine these types of neural nets (forgive me, I'm not a researcher, still rather a beginner and studying CNNs now) such that they recognize actions? If that is the case, companies like FB could help moderators by running these networks against videos before they go public, and help the public by stating what the networks are looking for, and when they flag, which ones flagged it and why.
It would certainly be better than the moderators they have now, who have extreme political bias.
... and then reverse the ban/allow buttons. Problem solved.
I think Facebook causes irrepairable harm to everyone who uses it and there should be a class-action lawsuit for every last one of them. The reparations should be one thing only: The total destruction of Facebook. Then we take that precedent and destroy all other so-called 'social media' cancer, too.
Maybe have everyone in the company moderate for 5 or 10 minutes a day. Delegate the burnout evenly between the available employees if you don't want to hire more. Otherwise - problems. Problems that many companies have. Facebook isn't unique there.
and then complain about the conditions?
Here's a hint: wear a rain coat and galoshes, at least!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
certain images that have scrolled past on my Facebook feed. I can't even fathom looking at that crap as a paying job.
I worked at several of the major search engines in the early 2000's. Unfortunately you end up looking at a lot of disturbing images and porn just to verify results of the tools you are building or the algorithms you are tweaking. I still remember and am glad I'm out of it. I can't imagine what content reviewers have to cope with looking at this stuff full time.
They'll only infest a solid framework. Burning the tech industry to the ground is the only way to fix this.
got me
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
It would be very expensive to keep everyone in the company up to date on the current rules and their accepted interpretations.
As well, if someone who takes on the job as a censor, presumably they have a fairly high tolerance for maintaining a distance between what they view at work and their day-to-day life (and will quit soon if they discover they are wrong about their self-assessment). This is sort of a job requirement.
However, someone who codes Java or designs web pages or works in accounting is much more likely to be a fragile special snowflake who could be haunted for a long time by a single image -- even one that actually didn't quite cross the line by FB's hyper-sensitive standards, let alone one that was an extreme example of a violation of those standards.
In most States that require voter ID, there is a way to get ID for free. Now, the usual cry is "but you have to go somewhere and stand in line and wait around forever and that's racist!" but I guess ANY effort at all is considered racist today.
And keeping with the same reflexion as I started above :
Poor people/minorities/Etc. don't have a wide choice of jobs and option for housing. Usually they live where the rent is the cheapest is some outskirts of a region and work completely at the opposite, because that's where there's work for them.
But they can't afford a car, so they need to commute through 3 different old half-broken buses. I they miss one, they'll have to wait a long time until the next. Overall they spend several hours each day just to go to work, which leaves very little time for anything else, even sleeping and eating.
No way to get anything else crammed into such a schedule.
US mentality :
- complain loudly that requiring poor people to obtain an ID is racist, because the minority can't cram it into their shitty life, only privileged white cis-het-male can easily do it, it's discriminatory !...
Rest of the developed world's mentality :
- notice that the above life is fundamentally unacceptable.
thus builds an actual useful public transportation network so owning a car isn't a necessity to have a normal life.
Yes, said network is build using money coming from taxes, we're evil socialo-eruo-communists!
(Also:
- social welfare and un employment benefit means that losing jobs/switching jobs is less a death sentence. If the job is that much shitty, it means you could decide to drop it and move to something more reasonable.
- also in some places, voter-ID is delivered for free to your mailbox, and you can vote for free using mail (and various pilot project for internet voting too).
you just need to be registered your address with the local authorities to get your voting material (and lots of other benefits).
- also, when you move in, it is mandatory for your employer to give you a day off so you can register your new address to get all the administrative benefits (including voting material mailed) ).
In general, when something that more or less makes basically sense but conflict due to poor people/minorities/etc. having shitty life :
- US will loudly complain that the minorities are discriminated against, and completely blocks the change that would have otherwise made sense.
- the rest of the developed world will actually try to fix the problems that was a barrage to poor people/minorities. Not only does it enable to pass the change that makes sense, but in the same go could fix tons of other problems that the minorities are facing.
(well okay, here in Europe we also have France, were complaining loudly about everything and being constantly on strike is a national sport).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe have everyone in the company moderate for 5 or 10 minutes a day. Delegate the burnout evenly between the available employees if you don't want to hire more. Otherwise - problems. Problems that many companies have. Facebook isn't unique there.
Moderating images of beheadings, child rape and bestiality are NOT "problems that many companies have", so perhaps we should just ignore your incredibly shortsighted and ignorant suggestion of making everyone do that job as if you're asking people to chip in for a fucking coffee fund.
Assuming people can withstand even 5 minutes exposure to what the sickest human minds on the planet are creating is like saying everyone can handle 5 minutes on the front line in a war. Needless to say, most of your employees are not cut out for that shit, and you WILL have far more problems trying to "delegate" burnout.
Thousands of people don't join a class-action lawsuit because the work environment here is "kind of bad" for the snowflakes. No, this is FUBAR-level shit that breaks minds rather permanently, and I'm forever thankful I was never in a financial position to be forced to take such a job.
then how come they took down my wikipedia copied picture of "human anus".
why can't i use that as my profile picture?
i'm just following popeye, i yam what i yams, and i aint what i aints