Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I agree with that one, but that janitor lawsuit would be justified if they aren't given the tools (like brushes and rubber gloves) to do their job safely.
So if this is a frivolous lawsuit depends on what facebook actually delivered when they said they would give the needed support for that job. (and maybe misleading job descriptions)
bickerdyke
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.
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.
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.
Also, I very much doubt that much illegal content gets uploaded to Facebook, were it should be pretty easy to identify who did it.
You'd be surprised...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I was going to comment the same thing. Apparently they want content moderators to filter the uploaded content before the content moderators filter the uploaded content.
Could be taken directly from "Idiocracy".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I'm really wondering who sees the content. Don't you usually just see stuff from your friends? Who are befriending the people that are posting the illegal content? I've never seen anything like the content in question on facebook. But I don't usually befriend random people I don't know. If somebody started sharing that kind of content, I would promptly block them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Yeah,
he would be surprised.
In Germany we had a case where 4 _boys_ about 15 or 16, raped a 14 year old girl.
Surprisingly the girl went straight to the police!
More surprisingly, the boys thought "we just had sex with a slut" and uploaded it on facebook.
They got them just a few hours after the incident.
Luckily, the police got them first ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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.
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.
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
... and then reverse the ban/allow buttons. Problem solved.
And how often does that happen? Enough to give thousands of moderators a lot of incidents of that nature? No. It does not. This is so rare that it makes the national news.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
You can be completely unaffected by an image and still understand the image meets a classification of not being acceptable.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Who do you use to categorize the videos, so that your murderer doesn't get traumatized by a rape video?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
got me
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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 ]
Of course it is rare.
I posted that only to support the parents point: there is no limit to human stupidity.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ok, but while this occurrence happens rarely, it can be downloaded and reposted thousand times by various people, for various reasons. Then it's like a cancer which moderators fight to eradicate.
Then you have car accidents occurring while being on Facebook Live, security cam footage of horrible scenes being uploaded and so on. Imagine liveleak posted on Facebook a thousand times over and having to be removed.
I worked as a field cameraman between 1999 and 2000, for a local TV in a town 50,000 people strong. There was a gruesome event every day. Fires, suicides, car accidents, you name it. We were contracted by the police to record all of those on tape and hand them a copy for their records. Back then it was difficult for Average Joe to record a footage of what happened and even more difficult to digitalize it and upload it to whatever excuse of social media existed at the time. Now, and passersby can pull out their phone and start recording video straight to Facebook. It's amazing how often people prioritize their brief moment of fame against the obvious need to help the victims of the event.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)