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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.
Where are you getting this from? It sounds like the fundamental complaint is that Facebook is not providing adequate resources to reasonable deal with the psychological harm from the job of filtering offensive content and specifically using contractors to avoid any long-term work compensation costs for counseling. Or is your point that it's not viable for Facebook to take upon those costs or expect to have to deal with workers in some fashion that doesn't allow them to dissolve financial or other responsibility?
It seems pretty clear to me if that Facebook recognizes that the job is substantially toxic to the mental health of its workers to the point that it's not viable for them to actually hire people without possibly violating OSHA regulations that it means they simply cannot have that job position. If their platform is not viable with that job position, then their platform is not viable. If Facebook wants to own all your data, then they should own the responsibility for that data along side the creator.
My gut feeling though is that as horrible as the job is, it's not something that could not be adequately paid for by Facebook including all associated financial psychological costs. Once that part is covered, most governments feel adults have sufficient choice and protection to not interfere. Really, your mentality seems as absurd as arguing factories where people complain about missing guard rails who keep falling into and dying from machinery could just be hired as contractors with wording in the contract that absolves themselves of OSHA or other compensation claims.
There are ways to limit the harm that this sort of work can do. Military orgs around the world have been studying it for decades, to try to prevent their soldiers getting PTSD and becoming ineffective. They have also been studying how to make it worse, as a tactic to use against the enemy.
One example would be limiting exposure. Rather than doing this for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week they might get only be assigned half an hour a day, with the option to continue for up to say two hours if they feel they are okay to do that. The limited exposure and granting of some control over the process really helps psychologically.
Of course the problem for Facebook is that they don't have enough staff already, and reducing them all from 37.5 hours/week to 2.5-10 will mean they have to hire a huge number more and either make the part time or find them other work to do in the mean time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's called the users, numbnuts. Moderates nominally only get involved after users report "illegal content". Ergo, these moderators are specifically watching content that has a substantial probability of being illegal.
Criminals do stupid shit and post it all the time, which is part of the reason they get got. Actually tracking down the source of an illegal video and not merely it's poster is not something that's inherently trivial or necessarily something which law enforcement will rapidly act on, especially as moderators are each expected to go through 10 million potential rule breaking post per week. Someone engage in a murder-suicide, suicide bombing, or generally suicide (which is oddly enough illegal in most places) also likely won't be around to face charges. There's also VPNs, bots, etc. Meanwhile, a lot of videos of stuff is perfectly legal even if the actions themselves are illegal/accidents. Would you like to watch 5 hours straight of car accidents?
So with your head firmly up your ass, what is the lawsuit demanding? That Facebook follows industry standards--things like reducing the resolution/quality of reported potential rule breaking content (with presumably an ability to restore quality as necessary)--and "On behalf of herself and all others similarly situated, Ms. Scola brings this action to stop these unlawful and unsafe workplace practices, to ensure Facebook and Pro Unlimited (collectively, “Defendants”) provide content moderators with proper mandatory onsite and ongoing mental health treatment and support, and to establish a medical monitoring fund for testing and providing mental health treatment to the thousands of former and current content moderators affected by Defendants’ unlawful practices." which can't use Pro Unlimited to contractual avoid nominal good industry practices.
Honestly, you're a contemptible asshole. You refuse to recognize the plainly obvious that people post horrible stuff online, whether it's illegal or not, and people whose job it is to process this, unless they're mentally defective, will develop mental defects without substantial ongoing counseling. The whole notion that people would seek these jobs and to have contempt for them because they suffer in them is as horrible as the standards in the past before the likes of OSHA where jobs that maimed people were common and expected without compensation or any serious effort to protect workers. If you honestly believe that that's the sort of workplace that should exist, I invite you to turn your own home into that sort of a physical death trap. Certainly, you're already a mental death trap.
I think there's a whole weird world of Facebook that ordinary people who have friend lists that mostly mirror their real lives never see.
My guess is its comprised of people making low-end money pushing scams and social-media-as-a-career, various swaths of low-income populations, bored and lonely shut-ins who will friend/like anything and have zero privacy settings, and then the truly weird and crazy bottom end of the population.
Plus, it's an international system. You can participate in high weirdness outside your geography.
I've been in lots of bars, but I've never seen a bar fight, gang rape or other type of horrible thing in a bar. I think it mostly just means I don't associate with those kinds of people or go to those kinds of bars, not that they don't exist.