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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....
They are clearly the wrong people for the job,
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.
What the Fc
[($)]
"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?
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.
"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.
Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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.
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.
How do those facebook moderators get the details of the Cognizant workers that they are able to track them down and threathen them?
At least hide the identities so they don't need to worry about what crazy people might do to them for reviewing their posts.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
If Facebook were really concerned about moderation and the people that perform the work, wouldn't they want those people and that skillset to be part of the company and not outsourced? Just another tech company that only values sales and engineering.
So, is this a recruitment drive for Facebook hidden behind a Slashdot submission or something?
Drugs and sex on the job? Sign me up.
You say a job with no skills, but being able to look at all that shit and compartmentalize it so it doesn't affect you is a necessary skill for this job. The problem is that they are not getting trained in the mental skills needed. Mirror neurons don't make a distinction between what we see and what we do. This affects everyone who gets exposed to that quantity of crap. The brain shifts its baseline for "normal" based on its environmental exposure. Unless the company is facilitating high quality positive experiences, the baseline for normal/healthy/sane is shifting subconsciously in the minds of the moderators.
It would seem rather obvious that a high turnover rate would be expected with this kind of work. As people continue to be exposed to this kind of material, one would imagine that 1) most people would begin to suffer mental and psychological trauma, and 2) a subset of people would actually enjoy it. The salary is perhaps less of an issue than the costs associated with the mental health care costs that those in the first group are likely to incur - or as in this case, the impact of self-mediciation spilling into the workplace. Given these aspects, it's also perhaps not surprising that they are all contractors, and can be routinely swapped out.
You should ensure that the fire exits are blocked and locked before you open the container of mustard gas. Trust me on that one, else you'll end up with almost a month of preparation and only a paltry body count to show for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... there may just not be enough people that are qualified and willing to do the job, so they make do with what they get.
Maybe there are no "right" people for the job, or at least not enough that are also willing to do it.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Consider a small, isolated community: If someone acts like a jackass, they will be socially shunned. If they persist in acting like a jackass, someone bigger and meaner will take them out behind the shed and "learn 'em". If they still persist, they will ultimately be run out of town.
In more civilized climes, the community hands over some of this responsibility to the government. There are laws about stalking harrassment, and the like. Ultimately, the punishments aren't all that different.
The problem in public, online communities is the lack of hard-and-fast identity, so that punishments can be applied. Sure, an account gets banned - but the person just makes another account. There's no "shed", and no real way to run the perp out of town. Moderation becomes nothing but a gigantic game of whac-a-mole - it's almost completely pointless.
It seems to me that part of the solution is to regain those small communities, by making online communities mostly private. Participants have to be invited; which means that they can easily be permanently disinvited. Just creating a new account won't garner an invitation to join.
Taking Facebook as the example (since it's the subject of TFA): Why should any profile be open to public comments? Let a profile show enough information for people to find you. But any interaction - posting or whatever - should require an explicit invitation. No invite for the asshat, and the person will never know they exist. And if you're a member of a group where people are saying bad things? Leave, problem solved.
If some asshat wants to post unpleasant stuff, they are absolutely free to do so - on their own profile, where only the people they invite will ever see it. It won't bother anyone else. But, but...what if they post something I don't like? Waaah!
- Fake news? Unpopular opinions? Let the invite-only groups entertain themselves. It's no one's business, and any intervention is really just censorship. Stupid people exist, and who knows, maybe we're actually the stupid ones. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down.
- Illegal material? Call the police, that's why they exist. Don't moderate - that's evidence tampering. Do what the police request, whether that's deleting the material, or leaving it up as evidence.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...they're just like the rest of us.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Look, a bunch of people who review comments on facebook talk about their corporate culture with the Verve. Sounds like they were just shit posting. I work in HR, ego I am ACing the shit out of this. Trust me. If this was really as rampant as they say, people would have crawled all up our ass. I have one guy who is banging his employee on the DL, outside of work and they are discrete. Yet everyone on the floor knows because we, as human beings, are nosey as shit. There is no way that it is as rampant in a large team as that and they don't have HUGE employee relations issues that filter to lawsuits and EEOC claims. Sounds like bunk to me. Now, if you excuse me, I need to tell said manager to stop fucking the help.
The only person making 28k a year at Wendy's is the owner. People have babies to feed already. Have you been into the bathroom at some of these Wendy's? Watching decapitation videos for forty hours a week might be easier on the psyche than scraping doo-doo butter off the walls twice a day.
Yeah, but you're going to end up dead or permanently imprisoned at the end of it anyway, so why get cheap?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
$6.9 billion in profits divided by 30,000 employees working on safety and security = $230,000 in profit per person in that division.
That math may be incorrect if contract content moderators aren't included in the 30,000 employees, and I'd be happy to have more accurate numbers. Still, it's clear where the profits are coming from: Investors are making money off of the fact that there are people desperate enough for a job that they're willing to do this job for shit wages.
The UFOs are real! The government knows and keeps quiet! Men in Black come and make people who know too much disappear!!!
For moderator: if you're female and frustrated, text me on 1-212-555-1234 for a good time!
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
We are used to professional level environments but at this income level this is more like restaurant or call center level crowd and these are probably mostly young people like those jobs. Their managers are probably parents as much as bosses.
This all sounds pretty similar to earlier in life when I worked in those kinds of environments. It's less people having sex and using drugs to cope with work than just people having sex and using drugs because sex and drugs are a great way to pass the time with coping as an excuse.
The $29k/yr
Are the sex and drugs provided or reimbursed?
Asking for a friend
Extending free speech to publicly accessible places on the internet like it is in the real world would just about do it.
There is the same amount of free speech in the real world. The person watching porn at Starbucks is going to be asked to leave or forcibly removed for trespassing if they don't comply.
But I'm sure the job has other perks as well.
Couldn't you just replace "Moderators" with "Employees" and still have a valid statement. My guess is a good fraction of that company is high and mentally distressed.
And Facebook is NEVER to blame for all the ads they push onto member newsfeeds without their consent? I absolutely despise those intrusions and I do everything to make the moderators' job as miserable as possible by vigorously reporting the ads, especially the scams like junk health treatments. Advertising storage units? Reported as "s3xually inappropriate". Restaurants? Reported as "political issue". Entertainment? Reported as "prohibited content". And yes I exclude as much personal info as possible from my profile so that FB can't exploit it for targeted marketing.
I don't like unsolicited ads consuming my internet monthly usage. Get in my way, and I will dish it right back where it hurts. My Facebook friends picked up on the tactic.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I mean really.. this is textbook for your average restaurant. I'd say the job responsibilities of surfing the type of content would encourage more action (read porn all day, have more sex in the office; read hate speech all day have anger issues; read conspiracies and fake news all day develop more of a broken perception of the world) but honestly.. all of those levels are so high in a kitchen we're talking about shades of grey here!
I've experimented with subjective moderation in a small forum community (~2000 DAU), back in the day of yore before facebook, when web forums were more relevant.
The "split" idea doesn't work work well for "average "joe" user because of choice paradox - the leeway *confuses* them. Such folks on average hate choices, thats why there are 3 variants of product, not 50.
Thats why a moderator is somehow elected and trusted to make decisions instead, and even tolerated for a bit when he's a bad shepherd.
Formally, we're talking mastrer/slave psychology in leadership and anthrophology. Basically respecting authority is convenient, and only when the (self)appointed authority exhibits egregious levels of operator abuse, replacement will be sought. Reminder that boiling frog and all other personal-social dynamics still apply.
This is also why representative democracy, instead of everyone just choosing their personal representative out of local politicians as their personal president. The latter is utter chaos unless elaborate bottom-up governance culture is build from the start, as seen in various models of social anarchy with strong emphasis on mentor/protege pairing (higher cognitive load), instead of "slaves" band wagoning fiat "slaver" authority we're naturally wired to do - it's simple to use lizard brain for this, but it scales poorly to large social groups.
I'm pretty sure people just disagreeing with global warming is enough to send Slashdot mods into suicidal nihilistic hedonism.
I do not think Vial means what you think it means.
moderating while not thoroughly baked.
[insert *anything* for 'moderating'.]
hi!
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
So does thinking this is a job I would actually like to do automatically disqualify me from doing it?
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, this is the kind of pwnage I read Slashdot for. Simply awesome.