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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.
Just imagine the AI that will one day get trained on that corpus....
This is the kind of job best suited for psychopaths. I don't mean that in jest. A psychopath doesn't become ill by seeing any of this, their mind is wired such that it doesn't affect them. And there are highly functioning, non-murderous psychopaths that'd do this job if the pay was high enough.
Alas, no company would want that cost, so psychologically damaging sane individuals in exchange for saving money it'll be, at least until laws protecting workers from psychological harm are enacted and enforced with the same rigor of laws protecting workers from bodily harm.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Such anger at psychology and psychiatry... are you perchance a scientologist?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
It's more deleting gore images. How many ripped open humans do you like to look at in the morning? When you're poor, you take any job you can. Only so many people can work in fast food and as cashiers.
"most users wouldn't even be stupid enough to post that stuff on Facebook in the first place"
You vastly overestimate the intelligence of your fellow man.
Pizzagate raged for months, Qanon is still going strong. A significant population of the US is dumb enough to believe that nonsense - and post repeatedly about it every day. And that's just the US nutters. Facebook reported 2,200,000,000 active monthly users globally in 2018. It has repeatedly been acknowledged that the number of moderators is insufficient to filter the existing content.
Working in finance, a lot of people in this business cope by drinking coffee while their biggest problem is staying awake, then switch to alcohol. Lots of high-functioning alcoholics (I was for a few years, but weaned myself off). Plenty of people smoke weed after work or take cocaine on the weekends. Also some guys hire prostitutes to talk out their day before going home to their family. (Prostitutes are cheaper than shrinks, work at more convenient hours for you if you have a day job, and will happily listen to all your problems, offer sympathy, and not tell anyone about it. You don't even need to have sex with them, although that's an option. They may also be able to give you a massage, sing karaoke with you, and other stuff.) But in general this kind of thing happens outside the office. The vices in the office are just the caffeine and alcohol.