Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Moderators Are Routinely High and Joke About Suicide To Cope With Job, Says Report (gizmodo.com)
According to a new report from The Verge, Facebook moderators in Phoenix, Arizona reportedly make just $28,800 a year and use sex and drugs to deal with the stress. "The report published on Monday detailed the experiences of current and former employees who worked at professional services company Cognizant, a company they say Facebook outsources its moderating efforts to," Gizmodo summarizes. "According to the report, employees experienced severe mental health distress, which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed. Some even began believing the conspiracy theories they were tasked with reviewing. One quality assurance manager said he began bringing a gun to work in response to threats from fired workers." From the report: "There was nothing that they were doing for us," one former moderator told The Verge, "other than expecting us to be able to identify when we're broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating -- they don't even see it. And that's what kills me." "Randy," a quality assurance worker at Cognizant charged with reviewing posts flagged by moderators, said that several times over his year at the company he was approached and intimidated by moderators to change his decisions. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," Randy told The Verge. He also said that fired Cognizant employees made what he believed to be genuine threats of harm to their former colleagues. Randy started to bring a concealed gun to the office to protect himself.
Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.
Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.
"Randy," a quality assurance worker at Cognizant charged with reviewing posts flagged by moderators
He must be one of the guys who has sex on the job. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around an office having a dedicated 'lactation room', but it sounds like an appropriate place to be groping breasts.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
This doesn't really add up. There are around 4500-7500 moderators on Facebook and while there is a lot of terrible stuff on the Internet, most of it could be automatically filtered away by content-id after first identifying it. Furthermore most users wouldn't even be stupid enough to post that stuff on Facebook in the first place, since that gets your account blocked and there are more appropriate places for it on the Internet. I doubt that leaves enough content to damage thousands of moderators.
AI doesn't get PTSD, or at least, no AI we can create in the foreseeable future will have such a capability.
Dont you remember microsofts twitter bot called Tay?
"She" was sweet enough at first, but after beeing subjected to the internet she quickly adopted conspiracy theories, became racist, misogynist and generally foul-mouthed.
MS took her down for some tweaks and when she came back she was very clearly into smoking weed as it was her favorite topic.
Not long after that she got stuck in a loop (bot-suicide).
#botshavefeelingstoo