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.

Comments

High on the job is an instant firing,

[Anonymous Coward]

They are clearly the wrong people for the job,

Re:High on the job is an instant firing,

[fazig]

Imagine to having to wade through all that cerebral diarrhoea that people post on facebook all of your work day. On top of that you get shitty pay that can't possibly cover any psychological or psychiatric treatment.
Losing faith in humanity and descending into hedonistic nihilism seems like a natural progression here.

What kind of person would it take to do such a job?

Re: High on the job is an instant firing,

[fazig]

Don't those usually sit at the top of the corporate chain?

Re:High on the job is an instant firing,

[Penguinisto]

Not a single person that is hanging the chickens upside down by their legs is sober. And nobody cares.

...Hell, none of those folks had a green card, let alone sobriety. ;)

(Guess where I worked while putting myself through school?)

However, you do bring up a good point: There are shit jobs everywhere. You do it and cash the paychecks while busting your ass to find something better (or you do it to get some sort of income until you graduate). Only the terminally lazy or incompetent stay at such a job for very long, and high turnover is not only endured, but expected. Think of it as the Telemarketer job, only you don't have to talk to people this time.

TFA's job doesn't take much in the way of skill - look at stuff, click buttons, move on. It's not as if Facebook has anything approaching QA for it - I mean, outside of a few (highly publicized) cases involving important people, what is the victim of bad/false Facebook moderation going to do - demand his money back? Given the tsunami of complaints about posts every day, you could simply nuke every post in your queue from orbit, and it would make approximately no difference. *shrug*

Are you surprised?

[Freischutz]

Facebook Moderators Are Routinely High and Joke About Suicide To Cope With Job ...

Are you surprised? They have to spend their days wading through the torrent of raw stupidity that are Facebook comments every moment of every working day. That is bound to destroy your faith in humanity as a a species and drive you to the brink of suicidal depression.

Re: Are you surprised?

[alexgieg]

Sure the content doesn’t bother them, but because it doesn’t bother them they probably don’t see the need to moderate it.

Actually, psychopaths are quite skilled at knowing what will bother others, even if it doesn't bother them personally, so they wouldn't really have difficulty moderating this kind of content.

Re: Are you surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's a mental problem you have right there

Re:Imagine the AI raised on this

[fazig]

It lends credence to scenarios like in Terminator or the Matrix.

Re: So a nomral average 20something life

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Just becus you may browse child abuse on your own does not mean that everyone else dose or that would be considered a normal browsing habit for a 20-25 year old.

This is literally ridiculous

[goose-incarnated]

Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?

Re:This is literally ridiculous

[jareth-0205]

Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?

Probably depends on how much and how often you have to deal with it. Speech matters.

Having to deal day-in-day-out with the conspiracy nuts, literal nazis, threats of violence etc., after a while, little by little, that's going to change you. That's exactly what they're talking about. Since you or I haven't done that job we aren't in a good position to judge what it's like.

Re:This is literally ridiculous

[Stan92057]

Never ceases to amaze me how some people think that because its said on the internet words don't hurt, that its not real..somehow.

Re:Randy

[Opportunist]

That's the dedicated room for fucking with a coworker.