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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....
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
[($)]
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?
which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
Well paid, highly functional psychopaths.
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.
"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.
Don't those usually sit at the top of the corporate chain?
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.
A “Lactating room” is a private room where a mother of a small child can use a breast pump to collect milk for her baby. Doing this in a bathroom is unsanitary and other areas are not private enough mostly due to our culture taboo on seeing breast.
Now before we get all the Right Wing hate, about how this is so expensive and cuts in productivity. Just remember how much time is wasted for smoking breaks, creating unused conference rooms, or the Empty office packed with tacky Christmas decorations. For the most part this is just labeling an unused room for a purpose.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Apparently not in this case; the moderation in TFA is handled by subcontractors earning a princely $28k/year(ok, almost $29k). With is probably a lot more than some of the offshored content moderators get; but is really scraping the bottom of 'well paid' by most definitions.
Facebook HQ doesn't soil its hands with that sort of thing; much less C-suit Facebook HQ.
Yes, I agree, it's not ok to screw in a lactation room.
There should be a dedicated room for fucking a coworker. If only due to the culture taboo of shagging someone in public.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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*
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
>There should be a dedicated room for fucking a coworker.
It's called HR office.
That's the dedicated room for fucking with a coworker.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?