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Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

• AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
  NDAs and non-compete agreements should not ever be considered as valid contracts by the government.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    I think you're painting with a very broad brush there. NDAs and non-competes have their uses. It's when they become part of the default boilerplate that everyone signs to get a job that the problems start.
    • AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
      > NDAs and non-competes have their uses I have yet to see a valid use that does not hinder whistle-blowing, the advancement of technology, or does not abuse the employees. I am sure that you will find a few valid use-cases if you try hard enough, however in the vast majority of cases they are used in order to repress the rights of others.
      • navigatesol 7y ago
        >I have yet to see a valid use that does not hinder whistle-blowing The legal system isn't static. If your company is breaking the law and you report it to authorities, your NDA will be unenforceable.
  • skybrian 7y ago
    Some NDA's can be too broad, but this is a bad take. It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets. This is what privacy regulations are all about. (At Facebook in particular, disclosing stuff about users is pretty bad, see lots of news stories over the last few years.) The balance between protecting privacy and making abuses public is pretty nuanced and doesn't lend itself to one-bit thinking.
    • maxerickson 7y ago
      Which privacy regulations protect corporations more than they protect actual meat people?
    • dustingetz 7y ago
      > needs to be Nothing needs to be anything, though the world order would certainly look different and reflect the interests of different classes of people than today
      • skybrian 7y ago
        Seems like looking at this from a class perspective only complicates things further?Poor people often have secrets and can be pretty vulnerable to attack if they're disclosed.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        No. But, in the absence of NDAs and other agreements for both employees and external partners, you'd see a great deal more limits on sharing information both within and without companies to a strictly need to know basis. Certainly those limits exist today to a degree because NDAs basically just allow for consequences. But if you can't keep someone from turning around and sharing anything you tell them other than through some sort of mutual trust, you'll be less inclined to share it.
    • AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
      > It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets I disagree, it needs to be possible for whistle-blowers to operate freely. It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide. > This is what privacy regulations are all about I am pretty sure that this is a separate thing to NDAs. Nevertheless I believe that the solution should be technical rather than legal, with things like end to end encryption and public key cryptography.
      • ghaff 7y ago
  • dec0dedab0de 7y ago
    If there were no NDAs then companies would exploit patent, trademarks and copywrite even more than they already do. If they kept NDAs limited to trade secrets then there wouldn't be a problem I think Non-competes should be limited to while youre actually working there
    • AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
      Companies seem to try to abuse patent, trademarks, and copyrights as much as they can anyway. The best of-course would be if NDAs, patents, and copyrights all disappeared overnight. Trademarks are generally fine but they can be abused.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    NDAs need to be heavily restricted, but it's a difficult distinction to draw between "trade secrets of the job" (which arguably should be protected) and "abusive working conditions" (which should not)
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      Honestly why the hell are trade secrets protected expect for misguised sense of intellectual property that forgets the concept was a contract and not a natural right? They don't even have the benefit of disclosure which patents were meant to give - to prevent said knowledge being lost. Trade secrets are why we had to investigate Damascus Steel reproduction throughly and still speculate. They give the useful arts and sciences nothing and yet they get free resources for enforcement. I believe the proper legal response from the state for breach of trade secrets should be "Wow, sucks to be you!" We really shouldn't be promoting that artificial scarcity and restriction of knowledge.
  • bloak 7y ago
    Do any companies use something more like a blackmailer's NDA, which works without a legal system? I'm not sure exactly how it would work, and perhaps it wouldn't work in practice, but I imagine it might involve paying the (former) employee a certain sum every month for their continued cooperation, and the employer would reserve the right to unilaterally cancel the arrangement: it would be "discretionary" or whatever. So the employee has a motive to cooperate (unless they're terminally ill ...) but there's nothing to "enforce".
• arethuza 7y ago
  Just a warning - I found even a short description of some of the videos they had to watch fairly disturbing. I don't think I could do that job for very long - let alone in a badly run, high pressure environment with low wages.
  • Pigo 7y ago
    I don't see how an average person could be expected to witness some of the things mentioned in the article. I didn't have time to read the entire article, but do they have counselors on staff or something? That one paragraph about organs was enough to ruin my day, and it was just text. I'm surprised such a "rash of videos" wasn't in the news somewhere.
    • arethuza 7y ago
      From the article: He sought out the on-site counselor for support, but found him unhelpful. “He just flat-out told me: ‘I don’t really know how to help you guys,’”
      • colpabar 7y ago
        So the counselors were probably an afterthought. I'd even bet the decision was made not as a way to keep the moderators from going insane, but to protect the company's image.
        • enraged_camel 7y ago
          I mean, a counselor can only do so much in this type of situation, since the patient is not in a position to remove the negative stimuli from their lives.
    • ceejayoz 7y ago
      > That one paragraph about organs was enough to ruin my day, and it was just text. I'm surprised such a "rash of videos" wasn't in the news somewhere. I'm left wondering if it was a clip from a horror movie or something. Shitty to see, but not necessarily newsworthy like "live children chopped up for organs" would be.
• luckylion 7y ago
  There seems to be a very distinct difference between employee classes. Management and high value tech employees are treated very well while moderators, gig workers etc are treated as "human resources", quite literally. It seems to me that they put companies like Cognizant between them and the exploited workers to deflect criticism as "we didn't know, we've been told by our partners that everything is great". And on a technical level: if true, how can it be that FB needs the same videos and pictures to be moderated over and over? Are they not using any form of content id? Is developing such a system more expensive than running content moderation sites and then swiftly firing the burnt out moderators? At what point do you become complicit if you're working for Facebook?
  • jsgo 7y ago
    The only problems I see are that someone could potentially upload a lower resolution version of the video a moderator has seen and then perhaps bypass the content id system (I don't know how tolerant they tend to be for situations as that). There's also the aspect of if we make it search out for distinct frames (like "scene change" type things), there's the possibility that some safe things could become auto-moderated which would be another controversy. Perhaps if they could locate start/stop times for inappropriate elements of the source video and then check for videos containing any of those in a later uploaded video, but then instead of asking human moderators to discern "is this video good or bad" we're now forcing them to get timestamps of when bad elements take place which would force them to really watch the video. Dunno, I'm of the belief that it's just not an easily solved problem. I hope I'm wrong and they can toss money at the problem to fix it, but I genuinely don't know how they could.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      Even with lower resolutions, fingerprinting (on a frame level) should still work relatively well, shouldn't it? If you get a certain level of confidence on each frame - if you have 80% of the frames with 80% confidence to be the same as $someVideo, that ought to be good enough overall to not get false positives but catch repeat views - how many 30s videos will randomly share 80% of their frames with a 90s video of an animal being abused? I assume that most of these videos aren't manipulated by professionals to escape a ban by looking completely different (which actually would make it a different video), but that they are mirrored, cut, have extra material appended or, as you suggested, have their resolution changed. I'd guess that videos are easier to ID than, say, image data, because you have plenty of material to work with. Are there well-organized troll armies attacking Facebook? Because trying to sneak a video in that shows an animal being abused and doing sophisticated changes to evade detection sounds weird on a platform where there isn't even (as far as I know) monetary gain connected to posting a video (as it might be on YT or for Email spam).
• james_pm 7y ago
  There were many reasons that led to me deleting my Facebook account in May, 2018. The fact that the platform is a magnet for the absolute worst of humanity and then employs and exploits people in such an inhumane and cavalier way to filter the garbage out was high on the list. Get Zuckerberg to do the job for a few hours and see what he thinks.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    I find that I haven't missed anything outside of people I haven't actually talked to in 10-20 years. Which, frankly, is easier. It's nice to let my social past stay in the past.
• cldellow 7y ago
  This was a valuable article to read. Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters. Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach. And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook: engineers ($150k/year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and content moderators ($30k/year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses). I understand the arguments about supply and demand of labour, but I'd have more respect for Facebook if they demonstrated awareness of this issue. The article talks about moderators re-evaluating the same piece of distressing content that they've already flagged. Why? I suspect because the moderator is cheap, and so Facebook isn't putting in the effort to ensure that every judgment needs to be made the minimum number of times. More so than salary, I suspect Facebook considers the moderator cheap in terms of reputation risk. By outsourcing to contractors located offsite from main campus, engineers aren't thinking daily about the absolutely horrible stuff moderators are seeing, and so the one group doesn't impact Facebook's ability to hire engineers. This is a guess - can anyone at Facebook speak to whether engineers are aware of the working conditions of moderators, and agitate to improve their lot?
  • baud147258 7y ago
    > cheap in terms of reputation risk Also in terms of the reputation of Facebook: any issue with moderation failures and Facebook can easily says that it's the contractor's fault
  • RegBarclay 7y ago
    I thought the same thing -- that once content is moderated, it should be trivial to block exactly the same content from being posted and moderated again. What a waste.
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      The problem is actual use and context sensitivity. Since if they let historic signifiant images get flat banned they also look like big bad idiots trying to memory hole history for blocking say death camp images while still having to ban asshats who post it and say "Not enough." Neither the text nor the image themselves would be ban worthy but in combination it is boot-worthy. Extrapolating has Scunthorpe problem issues.
• the_duke 7y ago
  Couldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be detected in an automated fashion? Especially screams in the audio should be fairly easy to find. Then block those videos by default, with a manual appeals process that sends it to a moderator, combined with a big warning that submitting videos against the TOS will get you suspended. Of course this could lead to people submitting videos without audio, but this will always be a cat and mouse game. Or is FB under legal duty to review potentially criminal content?
  • mschuster91 7y ago
    > Shouldn't violence (both towards animals and humans) be farely easy to detect in an automated fashion? No. Already filters fuck up way too much and restrict perfectly legal content.
    • the_duke 7y ago
      That's why I mentioned an appeals process for requesting human review. As long as this exists and actually leads to human review, I'd much rather wait a while for my videos to be posted if it means easing the burden on 15.000 people having to watch highly damaging content.
      • Konnstann 7y ago
        Why wouldn't the people who upload violent/pornographic content not always appeal their videos? It's not like they're accidentally posting banned content. This would lead to nothing more than a slight delay before it gets banned by a moderator, solving nothing.
        • mschuster91 7y ago
          > It's not like they're accidentally posting banned content. They simply hope it ain't going to be flagged by another Facebook user or their AI.
    • onion2k 7y ago
• arethuza 7y ago
  Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....
  • rorykoehler 7y ago
    All the devs would leave
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      ...but there must be a downside, no? (stolen from Scott Adams.)
    • arethuza 7y ago
      That's probably true - I wonder whether it would be because of the affront of having to do such menial tasks or the horror of realising that operating a global social network requires somebody to trawl through the filth and risk their mental health?
      • sillyquiet 7y ago
        No, its more like the devs have the necessary marketplace leverage and fallback to either put a quash on that notion or move on to another less ridiculous job. Don't think for a minute devs wouldn't be treated the same (and in some places ARE) if the corporate c-levels could get away with it without bleeding talent that is expensive to re-acquire. I am not, by any means, a Workers of the World Unite kinda person, but group negotiation and gasp unionization is becoming more and more necessary - if ONLY to get the beancounters to consider labor in their souless cost calculations when making decisions that lead to the conditions in the article.
        • malaxii 7y ago
          Historically, unions are a tried and true way for improving working conditions and average compensation. Of course, that's also the reason why they are so vehemently opposed...
• s_dev 7y ago
  I live in East Wall, Dublin -- beside the Facebook moderator (The Beckett) building. I wonder if this is true for them as well or if it's just N. America -- we've better employment protections and minimum wage in Ireland compared to the US.
  • anon029102 7y ago
    AFAIK Content reviewers in the Dublin office work for Facebook as perm employees (are not contractors), and mostly deal with escalated cases from offsite contractors.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      Nope, that's not true (unfortunately). Most of the moderators in Dublin (approx 75%) are contractors, but there are a lot more full-time moderators in Dublin, as global moderation (ex US) is run from that office
  • jdietrich 7y ago
    The Irish Times recently published a similar story: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/facebook-s-dirty-work-in-ireland-i-had-to-watch-footage-of-a-person-being-beaten-to-death-1.3841743 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/facebook-s-d...
• creaghpatr 7y ago
  For the wage mentioned in the article, I'm surprised they don't have trouble finding people to do the job. >Speagle helps to take care of his parents, who have health problems, and was afraid to quit Cognizant. “It was tough to find a job down here in this market,” he said. Tougher than watching graphic PTSD-inducing videos every day? It sounds like the job absolutely sucks but these contractors need to have a little bit of personal responsibility for their own mental health. I suspect they do but the article gives the impression they are all trapped there with no way out. Tampa is a major call center hub so I imagine contractor positions are opening up all the time given general churn rates.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    It's not easy to self diagnose for this stuff. "You just read Facebook posts and look at pictures? No customer yelling at you? Sounds easy."
  • danharaj 7y ago
    > It sounds like the job absolutely sucks but these contractors need to have a little bit of personal responsibility for their own mental health. I suspect they do but the article gives the impression they are all trapped there with no way out. > Tampa is a major call center hub so I imagine contractor positions are opening up all the time given general churn rates. What matters is that you've come up with a narrative that convinces you it's the workers' fault.
    • creaghpatr 7y ago
      Are you really trying to gaslight me here? Why not address my argument instead?
      • mcbits 7y ago
        Your argument being ... that they should simply get a new job if it's so bad, or that the article must be misrepresenting the job if they don't?
• comboy 7y ago
  > But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue (..) They kept reposting it again and again and again. Seems like it should be pretty "easy" to spot similar videos and audio (even after some modifications) given how great dataset all those moderators are providing. I'm pretty sure there are some pretty smart folks working at fb, so it would mean that given accuracy standards it's still cheaper for them to hire humans to do the job.
  • dillonmckay 7y ago
    No, that is only to protect IP rights.
    • comboy 7y ago
      I don't understand, can you elaborate? What difference does it make if a duplicate is spotted by a human vs by a machine?
      • cldellow 7y ago
        If Facebook repeatedly permits copyright infringement on the same video, they might get sued by the rightsholder, which might be a very wealthy company with experience enforcing its rights in courts. In they repeatedly make a $30,000/year employee view 15 seconds of the same child being beaten to a pulp (...the minimum time they are obligated to watch each clip before rendering a judgment), the employee will just quit after their health declines past a certain point. So while the technology could be applied to both contexts, there's probably a lot more economic incentive to apply it to the first context than the second one.
        • thecatspaw 7y ago
          Wouldnt it be more economically viable to use it also for moderation? What is the point of making an employee watch the same video again, when they could instead moderate another video?
• SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  "Conditions at the Phoenix site have not improved significantly since I visited. Last week, some employees were sent home after an infestation of bed bugs was discovered in the office — the second time bed bugs have been found there this year. Employees who contacted me worried that the infestation would spread to their own homes, and said managers told them Cognizant would not pay to clean their homes." This is utterly nightmarish, given how costly to one's life bedbugs are. (clearing out a home, including the replacing of all mattesses/couches, and bagging or hot-cleaning all clothing, sheets, towels, rugs...) "A manager saw that she was not feeling well, and brought a trash can to her desk so she could vomit in it. So she did." This particular manager put their employees in danger of catching illness, especially given what appears to be the open office floorplan where airborne sicknesses can travel the entire room. I'm shocked and apalled, and this is the stuff I'm comfortable quoting from the article to be shocked and apalled by. The other stuff has convinced me to help inform friends and family to get off facebook rather than passively clean myself of it only.
  • awakeasleep 7y ago
    This is industry standard in businesses with limited sick day or leave policies. Especially in call center type environments. Once an employee has used their allotment, they receive a write up if they take off again no matter how ill. Too many write ups and you're fired. Managers have no discretion in this process, so they can only mitigate the impact by doing something like bringing the trash can over or buying hospital masks. Not saying it’s acceptable! But this isn’t a facebook problem specifically.
    • organsnyder 7y ago
      A local healthcare system has a similar policy: PTO (paid time off) is not differentiated between sick days vs. other days off. They don't offer any sort of maternity/paternity leave, aside from what the US Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires, which is six weeks unpaid time off. Even worse, they require employees to burn up all of their accrued PTO days before taking any unpaid FMLA time. So you have new parents returning to work sleep-deprived, picking up new viruses from the petri dish that is their kid's new daycare, with no time off. And most of these workers are HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS. How stupid are we as a nation that we don't mandate more humane/non-stupid policies, even for people in environments where coming to work unhealthy can often result in death?
• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I've worked some shit jobs over the years an I can't say I wouldn't be very tempted to try working there for $15/hr if I was still in the market for that kind of job and everything else around is paying closer to $9. I know HN likes to grandstand about how important workplace conditions are but when you're doing unskilled jobs you don't have that luxury. If you get the opportunity to do a worse job for 66% more money you take it and try to do it well enough to keep cashing that check. I know that a lot of people here are probably bothered by the fact that the workplace sounds like impersonal zoo but most of these minimum wage workplaces are along that spectrum. Dirty bathrooms, inflexible policies for everything, etc. are normal. It's just how workplaces like this are. If you want a shitty job that's more personal and flexible then you need to work for a small employer but that can have its downsides too. Sure the content itself sucks particularly but that's why they pay bigger bucks than everyone else if you can cope then good for you. If you can't you leave. It's just like a call center but more extreme. Don't mistake me as defending Facebook or Cognizant here, I'm not. I'm just saying this that all things considered this doesn't seem like a particularly bad deal as far a shitty unskilled jobs go. They all have their pros and cons and you gotta find something that works for your personal preferences. I'd take digging ditches over anything with rigid corporate policy about every facet of my job but that's just my preference. Personally something I think would help a lot would be if they'd over-staff the place and schedule people for few enough hours that they can easily hold another job and make efforts to accommodate people's other commitments. Just doing content moderation every day is probably where a lot of the mental and physical health issues comes from. In my experience the kinds of jobs that really grind you down grind you down a lot less when they're your side gig to some other slightly less shit job.
• arzeth 7y ago
  I have a hotkey in i3wm: bindsym $mod+backslash exec "xcalib -i -a" which inverts all colors (btw, I have to `killall redshift` because of a bug). When colors are inverted, I feel almost undisturbed at any gruesome content (for me it's like seeing screenshots of Quake 2 with buggy GPU drivers), yet I can still easily recognise whether the content is disturbing. And when it's a video, I play it at ≥2x speed so that it wouldn't feel realistic for my brain. I wonder whether those moderators use these two lifehacks.
  • anon029102 7y ago
    They wouldn't be allowed to.
  • akerro 7y ago
    They most likely can't change wallpaper on their windows XP...
  • bamboozled 7y ago
    It seems like moderating audio is also part of the job and equally disturbing as the video. Not sure how you get around that.
    • knd775 7y ago
      Chipmunk voices? Might make it feel less real
  • theNJR 7y ago
    What are you doing that requires this so frequently?
  • rock_hard 7y ago
    There was a previous article a couple month ago that explained that this sort of stuff is already build into the moderation tools.
• save_ferris 7y ago
  It’s strange how quiet the pro-Facebookers become on threads like these. Yesterday, we saw a lot of energy around Libra on both sides of the Facebook spectrum. I’d love to hear an argument from someone defending this company that isn’t “everybody does it.”
  • holidaygoose 7y ago
    It seems like content moderation is just a crazy wicked problem. And the company is doing the best it can with a lot of constraints. Better communication with the workers sounds like it would help, but what else should they be doing realistically?
    • anon029102 7y ago
      > what else should they be doing realistically? - Pay them better - Give them proper healthcare - Don't isolate/silo them These things would enable them to better deal with the inevitable stress and secondary PTSD that comes with their work. And would help FB perms to observe difficulties and quickly affect change.
      • bilbo0s 7y ago
        Well, they should be elevated above the other departments to handle the obvious security and conflict of interest issues that naturally exist in any company like this. So their salaries should be much higher. And actually, more important than healthcare, which the employee takes advantage of at the employee's own discretion, there should be mandatory mental health counseling and screening. I don't know what the frequency should be, I'm not a clinician. But my layman's guess would be a minimum of 3 times a year for each employee. But I disagree about siloing them. I mean, I'm sure there are some pretty good security reasons for siloing content moderation off from other parts of the company. Not saying that anyone from FB would necessarily do the following, but imagine an ad sales bonuses start going away because clicks are down. You just can't have ad sales cooperating with content moderation in any way shape or form to get more clickable content through. There should just be a content policy, and content moderation zaps whatever they please. End of story. That's how it should work. If ad sales wants input, they should have to convince legal to change the content policy. In other words, if this thing were structured correctly, content moderation would be above most everything else. (Everything other than legal.) And completely untouchable via any mechanism other than an official change of the acceptable use and content policies.
• apanloco 7y ago
  800 workers, 1 bathroom. Really?
  • dillonmckay 7y ago
    Sounds like my current HQ. I have worked for too many startups with inadequate bathroom setups. It is a big red-flag for me now.
    • joezydeco 7y ago
      I've used this as a hidden criteria for judging a company during an interview cycle. I always ask to use the bathroom and then see how clean it is, and if it looks like it's been maintained. I visited one private company where I talked to the owner - his office was plastered with pictures of his racing Porsche but the bathroom had rusted metal and peeling paint. Took me about 5 seconds to see where his priorities lay and I bugged out of there.
      • dillonmckay 7y ago
        The other red-flag was seeing all the framed photos on the CEO’s desk, of his family. All the pictures were facing away from him, so it seemed like he was advertising his family to anybody sitting in front of his desk. Maybe he didn’t like looking at them? Very bizarre.
        • joezydeco 7y ago
          Wow, that's messed up. All I can figure is that he's trying to soften or deflect anger at him when people come into the room. How can you be mad at him when he's just a simple family man?
• anon029102 7y ago
  Guy Rosen and other execs within Integrity team continually skirt their responsibilities here. They claim they're doing better, but the second-order effects of crappy work conditions and demands keep cropping up. Zuck says one day we will hopefully be able to AI-away this integrity work (especially the most traumatizing), but he does not say a whisper as to improving working conditions or pay while the work needs to be done by humans. And I bet Zuck wouldn't be able to handle the content that these people have to view. Sheryl does not care. She keeps referencing the same standard schpiel about how contracting companies have to abide by a strict set of standards, and how they're ahead of the market in terms of pay and wellbeing. But it's still awful. The divide between contractors and full-time workers at Facebook is truly disgusting. People who work at Facebook should be pushing for change. But they're numb to the schpiel. They're cushy and looked after and don't want to create a fuss. Rosen doesn't care. Zuck doesn't care. Sheryl doesn't care. What DO they care about? Perception. Sit in any high-up integrity meeting and you'll see the only thing they seem to talk about is how "x" would be received by users at scale. There's no comment as to the ethics or corporate responsibility. You can be talking about something pretty out there like how human rights intersect with takedown decisions and all you've got is a bunch of people umming-and-ahhing about lossy metrics and how Zuck wants this or that so we better hurry up. Or how awwesome it'll look on our PSCs if we ship this thing. Broken company.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • deusofnull 7y ago
    You're right, Facebook is a broken company. Along that point, we should break it up.
    • allthecybers 7y ago
      I agree and in a more enlightened future I hope we can assess companies like this on their net benefit to society and apply penalties when they act in a way that negatively affects society.
    • TaylorAlexander 7y ago
• martin1b 7y ago
  The issue is not as much Cognizant or FB as it is the state of the public. The horrible acts posted online for entertainment by the public is the reason for companies like Cognizant. I hope these posts can forwarded to local law enforcement and the posts used as evidence against the poster.
  • cldellow 7y ago
    The article implies strongly that Facebook prefers to focus on the short term task of blocking offensive content and only pays lip service to the long term task of pursuing criminal charges. I'd definitely believe that that is the case, as there's little economic incentive to play the long term game with its uncertain payout if you can just churn through low-wage content moderators instead. Users of Facebook, but more realistically, employees of Facebook are the ones best situated to pressure Facebook to change that behavior.
    • britch 7y ago
      There's also the possibility of passing a law around this issue. It doesn't have to be entirely market forces.
  • cloakandswagger 7y ago
    As evidence of what?
    • martin1b 7y ago
      Crime. Several of the examples are clearly cruelty to animals. If a cop watched them do it, they would be arrested on the spot.
  • britch 7y ago
    Come on... don't let FB off the hook. Don't just stand up and blame "society." Posting violent, hateful, evil stuff is as old as the internet itself. There will always need to be moderators. The question is how these people are treated. Do you really think it is _impossible_ for a company as big and valuable as FB to treat these moderators well? Do they not have the money to pay them what they deserve, to give them sick leave, and to offer even basic mental health services? Imagine if half or even a quarter the money and effort that has gone into their crypto debut had gone into helping build better tools and services for their moderation team.
• negamax 7y ago
  This is done for Youtube as well btw. Not a FB only problem.
• hirundo 7y ago
  > Nobody’s prepared to see a little girl have her organs taken out while she’s still alive and screaming. On the one hand, of course you don't want to see this and of course you want it removed from your social media feed. On the other hand, if it's hidden, it horrifies fewer people, and instead of rising social pressure to take action against it, it can fester in the dark. So if we manage to replace a significant chunk of centralized, moderated social media with decentralized, unmoderated alternatives, many of us will be exposed to more of this kind of evil. But as a result more of us will be aware of it and motivated to fight it. I'd rather participate in unmoderated media, even at a greater risk of being assaulted by this kind of crap. But at this extreme I can sympathize with those that want straight up censorship, even if sunlight is a better long term disinfectant.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Context matters: it's this kind of thing that was used to promote the massacres of the Rohingya. Or consider the various things that are posted about Syria. Pictures of atrocities without clear attribution of those responsible just make the situation worse and provoke reprisals against the wrong people.
  • behringer 7y ago
    Not in a million years would most people put up with it. If I ever saw something like that on FB I'd immediately delete my account.
• phosphophyllite 7y ago
  Maybe censoring is not effective? Why not to embrace any content and just make police raids when someone uploads questionable content? Is censorship solves anything?
  • bilbo0s 7y ago
    Um... police busting down your door for uploading a video kind of is censorship. But yeah, I'm now starting to see why more and more people are just wanting to go to the censor and police raid system. A lot of this stuff people are uploading just doesn't belong in a civilized society. What started off as maybe just content on making non violent jokes about blacks or gays has morphed into showing children being disemboweled and videos of little old black or jewish ladies being gunned down in their place of worship. It's just gone too far. Probably just have to file it under: "This is why we can't have nice things"
    • pjc50 7y ago
      > maybe just content on making non violent jokes about blacks or gays The nonviolent "jokes" have a habit of escalating into real violence. If you let enough people post N-word rants without consequence and with validation from their hateful peers often enough they will egg each other on until eventually someone burns down or shoots up a church.
      • bilbo0s 7y ago
        Yeah, I guess that's what I'm starting to see. Like I said, "This is why we can't have nice things."
        • saalweachter 7y ago
          Ultimately you can only have one absolute principle or right; if you have two, eventually they will come into conflict and you have to decide which is really absolute and which is just mostly absolute.
  • 7y ago
• spunker540 7y ago
  “But had his managers asked, they would have learned that Speagle had a history of anxiety and depression“ Should employers really be asking about mental health history during the hiring process?
  • mpclark 7y ago
    Of course, if the job involves risks to mental health!
    • cloakandswagger 7y ago
      Queue up the next Verge article in 6 months: "Facebook discriminates on the basis of mental health"
      • SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        I mean they really should be in this case. This is not a normal job.
        • bena 7y ago
          The real solution is that they present the reality of the job and let the candidate make the decision to proceed or not. That way the company presented the job as is. And if the candidate takes the job, they own some of the responsibility for the consequences.
          • SomeOldThrow 7y ago
            I can certainly agree with that.
  • mhh__ 7y ago
    > Should employers really be asking about mental health history during the hiring process? There should be some disclosure of potential mental health risks in the job description. no? i.e. Screening for this at a later stage in the hiring process would be reasonable (No idea on the legality, however)
• b3lvedere 7y ago
  "He watched videos of people playing with human fetuses, and says he learned that they are allowed on Facebook “as long as the skin is translucent.” Wow. Just Wow.
  • lazugod 7y ago
    This sounds like a fantastic example of basing moral guidelines around what is easy for a computer to detect rather than what is actually moral. We know that FB has nudity detection systems, due to their past problems with banning breastfeeding discussion groups.
    • LucasLarson 7y ago
      Unfortunately, it’s human work. The paragraph reads “For the six months after he was hired, Speagle would moderate 100 to 200 posts a day. He watched people throw puppies into a raging river, and put lit fireworks in dogs’ mouths. He watched people mutilate the genitals of a live mouse, and chop off a cat’s face with a hatchet. He watched videos of people playing with human fetuses, and says he learned that they are allowed on Facebook ‘as long as the skin is translucent.’ He found that he could no longer sleep for more than two or three hours a night. He would frequently wake up in a cold sweat, crying.”
• r3vrse 7y ago
  Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content. Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it. Can't kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we'll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn't exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes. Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective, insatiable gaping maw.
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    Yup; bear in mind that pretty much ALL major user-generated content websites have to deal with this - think Google (and I now wonder if G+, Picasa, etc were shut down because they couldn't handle the inappropriate content anymore?), Dropbox (who may do a passive one where they only investigate if reported by law enforcement), Youtube (also Google), Discord, Slack, etc. It's a problem everywhere. I also believe this is one of the reasons where Facebook's real name policy comes in - it discourages people from posting the worst of it. Animal brutality could just be kids fooling around on their phone, accidental, but produced child pornography is not, and the people making that shit know really well how they shouldn't put it on sites that require them to use their real names.
  • blablabla123 7y ago
    Every web community has to deal with this, some types of communities are more prone to this than others. On HN this obviously works very well, also other 90s style web forums don't suffer these problems but that's probably also because those usually have a very close scope and attract only certain kind of people. Facebook is really broad, so are also online news magazines which are sometimes full of horrible comments (only text of course). Usenet more or less ceased to exist because of that. So in reality this is not a Facebook problem but an online community problem - it just looks like a FB problem because that's the major online community. I wonder if this could be solved with a 3rd party Facebook integration/startup :-). Anyway, Facebook also has more problems with that, another one being undesired unsolicited contacts which fall into the same category of not so nice stuff about Facebook. People don't see the meat production but the bad smell is really close which is why many leave.
• close04 7y ago
  > Florida law does not require employers to offer sick leave, and so Cognizant workers who feel ill must instead use personal leave time. It seems that Facebook and Cognizant are not the only ones completely failing at protecting their people (employees, contractors, citizens).
  • save_ferris 7y ago
    Lobbying plays a huge role in how legislative decisions like this are made. The city of Austin recently passed a mandatory sick leave policy, only to be struck down at the state level after lobbying by employers. It’s not that companies like Facebook simply fail to protect their people, they’re financially incentivized to undermine their rights. And since money == free speech in the US, it’s perfectly legal for them to do so.
    • close04 7y ago
      > they’re financially incentivized to undermine their rights In the end most failings can be traced back to financial interest (getting cheap, staying cheap, aiming for cheaper). But the whole article was about how Cognizant and Facebook fail those poor souls who have to go through a "peaceful war", with all the gruesome tragedies but none of the preparation. The state doesn't seem to try harder either. This particular detail related to sick leave was surprising to me, I hadn't expected this.
• ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  I'm sure such scale requires heavy moderation. It pains me to realize the cost of enjoying the benefits of social media - if any, at all - that it makes me wonder whether we should have it in the first place at all. I can imagine a world without Facebook.
  • overthemoon 7y ago
    This is what I keep coming back to. I don't think Facebook is worth it. I would personally extend this to most, if not all, social media.
  • aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    It's sad to realize that the world is worse than we previously thought, but it's not obviously worse overall. Not having social media, or anything similar, and thus not having to moderate awful content, wouldn't (necessarily) cause all of the terrible behavior depicted in that content to not happen. People can be awful. So can other organisms (independent of whether they're evil or just immoral). Not facing that fact, at all, isn't obviously best.
• Proven 7y ago
  > The 800 or so workers there face relentless pressure from their bosses They're not slaves. Like those Foxconn workers, they can leave for a Tier 2 employer or find something else to do. > to better enforce the social network’s community standards, which receive near-daily updates that leave its contractor workforce in a perpetual state of uncertainty. tl;dr - all of this is completely unnecessary. If American control freaks (in this case, mostly socialists) stopped attacking FB with constantly new types of complaints and censorship requests, both workers and their managers would live happier lives and their accuracy wouldn't be below target (that is, if they used common standards and common sense in their work, there would be less false positives and false negatives).
• DannyB2 7y ago
  > there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook: > engineers ($150k/year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and > content moderators ($30k/year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses). If Facebook could get away with paying engineers $30K/year, no benefits, believe me, they would.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • H8crilA 7y ago
    I'm sorry but who wouldn't? I would.
    • anarchy8 7y ago
      I wouldn't, because that would be horrible...
      • H8crilA 7y ago
        How much would you pay your house cleaner? 100k a year? Do you tip $100 USD in restaurants so that waiters can enjoy similar effective salary?
        • reactorofr 7y ago
          I would if I could, absolutely.
          • csallen 7y ago
            What's stopping you from giving high percentages of your income/wealth away to those less fortunate than you right now?
            • amanaplanacanal 7y ago
              Wait, how do you know they don't?
• almost_usual 7y ago
  Facebook really doesn’t need to exist.
• skizm 7y ago
  They should pay users small amounts of Libra for accurately moderating content. It completely solves the problem and they get to pay their new, more willing, contractors in what basically amounts to monopoly money (in the near term at least).
• ycombonator 7y ago
  Cognizant is a ‘win at all costs’ major outsourcer. Their entire operations and staff are based in India and they are registered in US to soften the regulatory hurdles. It’s no surprise they didn’t have a defibrillator in the building.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  I think the most pertinent question is why don't they quit? It says a great deal about how broken the United States' job market and social safety net are. If minimum wage were $15, they could find another job that paid their basic living expenses. If health care weren't left up to your employer, they wouldn't be out of luck while looking for a different job. If there were any alternative, they wouldn't stay in this hellscape. They stay because this is the best deal they could find. Think about the kind of society that makes that the case.
  • enibundo 7y ago
    Maybe they think that flagging shit online is easy and pays well to later find themselves with anxiety in the house. This kind of stuff is never easy to pin point
    • _bxg1 7y ago
      Maybe when they apply. But from the sound of things that idea would vanish in the first week.
      • Barrin92 7y ago
        many do leave as the turnover rate is extremely high, but with an increasingly underempoyed white collar workforce and rising rent and healthcare and education cost there's a pretty huge pool of reserve labour to churn through. This is really just a giant meatgrinder for the population outside of the "cognitive elite" class and probably a good sign of things to come for the workplace of the future of half of the population.
  • spamizbad 7y ago
    It also sounds like they are sold on the empty promise that these jobs will get your foot through the door into the lucrative technology industry.
    • _bxg1 7y ago
      It seems pretty clear that they stayed after any illusion of that fell away.
• ryanmarsh 7y ago
  I read the bit about the children having their organs harvested while alive and didn’t believe it so I did some googling and now I’m done for the day. I’m gonna go hug my kids.
  • kilroy123 7y ago
    I'll take your word and skip on the googling myself. Seriously disturbing stuff.
• redm 7y ago
  This story reads like a journalist trying to find some dirt on Facebook because its “hot” right now. Its the inverse of writing fluff stories when everyones excited about a startup. This story isn't even Facebook. I worked tech support for Acer in the 90s and its a similar setup. If they took the time to have “relaxation” rooms, i doubt its as bad as the story makes it out to be.
  • rawrmaan 7y ago
    You obviously didn't read the article.
    • redm 7y ago
      Actually, I did, obviously. I feel I have a much better picture of contracted centers like the one described in the article than a sensationalizing story from The Verge could inform me of though.
      • rootlocus 7y ago
        You said: > If they took the time to have “relaxation” rooms, i doubt its as bad as the story makes it out to be. The article said: > Facebook contractors are required to use a browser extension to report every time they use the restroom, but during a recent illness, Lola quickly took all her allotted breaks. She had previously been written up for going to the bathroom too many times, she said, and so she felt afraid to get up from her desk. A manager saw that she was not feeling well, and brought a trash can to her desk so she could vomit in it. So she did.
• Verdex 7y ago
  So ... we all need to start flagging beautiful nature scenes, humorous comics, lists of health tips, and job postings for less stressful jobs that you could do if you're already qualified for being a facebook moderator? At least that way they get a bit of a break from all the other horrible stuff.
  • panic 7y ago
    This is a great idea if you could get people to do it at scale -- it raises awareness, improves the lives of the moderators, and forces Facebook to deal with the increased volume of reports all at the same time.
• toss1 7y ago
  >> "Speagle vividly recalls the first video he saw in his new assignment. Two teenagers spot an iguana on the ground, and one picks it up by the tail. A third teenager films what happens next: the teen holding the iguana begins smashing it onto the street. “They beat the living shit out of this thing,” Speagle told me, as tears welled up in his eyes. “The iguana was screaming and crying. And they didn’t stop until the thing was a bloody pulp.” >>"Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook. A manager told him that by leaving the video online, authorities would be able to catch the perpetrators." Utterly disgusting and inhumane policy on facebook's part. Continuing to display abject animal cruelty only lowers the bar for would-be imitators. There have also been shown to be strong links between animal cruelty and human cruelty, including murder. To be clear, the ONLY proper way to handle this is to immediately take it down and file a report with the relevant police agencies. Expecting the local police agencies to maintain the same staff of 30,000 people to monitor FB posts for crime is stupidly absurd. This is at best depraved indifference on FB's part, and more likely a deliberate dishonest rationalization to keep posted something extreme that will get lots of 'views' and 'engagement'. This is only one of millions of examples, including cooperating with the Russian / Cambridge Analytica / etc groups to corrupt elections in the US, England, and elsewhere. Simply put, Facebook is deliberately poisoning society for profit, and far worse than any tobacco company ever did. They need to be shut down. Now. There are far better ways to do everything FB claims to do. (edit: add police report paragraph)
  • toss1 7y ago
    At the very least, FB must be held to account as editors. FB vigorously opposes this. However, with 1) a staff of 30K++ screeners, 2) who knows how many moderators, etc, 3) many layers of management decisions and policy on what is and is not allowed on the platform and the reasons why/why not, 4) extensive human & algorithmic promotion and demotion of content, they are absolutely actively editing their site. This is arguably even more extensive editing than from any print or media organization. The only reason FB wants to avoid the "editing" label is so they can edit as they please. I.e., they want to edit for 'engagement' and profit, not for social responsibility. This cannot remain out of control without consequences, which we are already seeing in society.
  • 7y ago
• aerovistae 7y ago
  Where are the organ harvesting videos coming from, I wonder? Anyone have any thoughts on that?
• dalore 7y ago
  If they made engineers take turns working in the content moderation you would soon see all sorts of improvements (like the aforementioned ability to recognize duplicate content for starters). They would hate it so much, that would make better tooling. But now they don't have to know about it, just send images to the moderation team over and over like they are robots.
  • Nasrudith 7y ago
    Couldn't it be just done in a more pleasant and efficient way by simply tasking them on moderation assistance tools instead of misplaced retribution? While putting themselves in the moderator's shoes may prove helpful they aren't comparable in skillsets. If they were given a command line interface for instance most mods would be puzzled. "Produced for self" and "produces for content moderators" are differing needs.
    • oarsinsync 7y ago
      Dogfooding isn't really retribution, so much as a reasonably effective way to better understand and capture requirements. Using the things you produce generally helps motivate ironing out bugs and/or improving the product overall.
      • michaelt 7y ago
        People in this discussion are misunderstanding one another because no-one's making a clear distinction between "Engineers/managers responsible for content moderation and with the power to improve the tools should have to do some content moderation themselves" and "All engineers/managers should do content moderation" Andy the content moderation tools developer could certainly benefit from experience using the tools he's working on. On the other hand Bob the Unix admin who keeps the CI cluster online can't iron out bugs in another team's product no matter how hard you motivate him. Needless to say, if someone writes about Andy but a reader thinks about Bob, the gap in whether the explanation makes sense might leave the reader sceptical about the writer's claims, or even their true motivation.
  • 7y ago
• jokoon 7y ago
  I would have thought they would have the best filtering AI and dataset the world has to offer, to avoid having those moderators to work like this.
  • daxterspeed 7y ago
    From the descriptions of the work in this article it sounds like Facebook is actively choosing to have the same moderator re-moderate the same content over and over. At that point it almost seems like intentional malice from Facebook rather than a "developer oversight". Surely the first time a video has been flagged it should be trivial to identify further uploads of that video? The only reasonable explanation I can imagine is that Facebook is doing everything they can to avoid having to implement a "Content ID" system like YouTube. Now why exactly they don't want to do that can only be speculated.
  • britch 7y ago
    Building an AI is expensive. It also means FB is on the hook for false classifications. This moderator labor is (relatively) cheap. It also allows FB to point to a third party if something goes wrong. Look at their statements in the article. It's easier for them to distance themselves and point to "bad actor" contractors than it is if these were direct FB employees.
  • Avshalom 7y ago
    a lot of "AI" is just poor people. in general response to this article there was a thread on twitter with some good links https://twitter.com/max_read/status/1141336189800239107 https://twitter.com/max_read/status/1141336189800239107
• dx7tnt 7y ago
  I can't wait until my bank has to pay teams of people to keep child porn and beheadings off its website!
• pfortuny 7y ago
  I cannot believe they require signing an NDA for this job. You cannot JUST VENT?
• atishay811 7y ago
  I imagine if Facebook could use its users to moderate content from others, say you are sign up for moderation, then have to moderate 20 posts from unrelated users to get 20 days of ad free Facebook. Facebook could employ a system like re captcha uses to identify users faking it. Win-win?
  • dRaBoQ 7y ago
    Facebook won't be able to install the necessary measures to prevent the moderators from saving the videos onto their own machines. A lot of the bad content is highly desired by criminals and can even be profitable to sell on the dark web (e.g. child abuse).
• doctorRetro 7y ago
  “I think Facebook needs to shut down." As I've spent the last few years pissing away absurd amounts of time on the platform, gotten in countless fruitless arguments, and seen the truly vile and toxic elements of my communities exposed and worn like a badge, this is an idea I've been thinking an awful lot about. After reading this article, I've never been more certain of that statement.
  • hvs 7y ago
    "We have met the enemy and he is us." https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/Pogo_-_Earth_Day_1971_poster.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/Pogo_-_Earth_... Shutting down FB will just create this problem in the next popular social media platform. This is a problem that needs to be solved, and shutting companies down won't do it.
    • darkpuma 7y ago
      Some problems can only be solved one generation at a time. Maybe facebook dying and the new generation coming to age is exactly what society needs.
    • 50656E6973 7y ago
      That's like saying there's no point in putting out house fires, because there's always going to be somewhere else that catches on fire. When a social gathering (whether its a party at a club or a riot in the streets) exceeds capacity and becomes dangerous, destructive, and out of control the police shut it down for the good of public safety.
      • hvs 7y ago
        That's the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying you need to put out the fire not just let it burn down and build a new house. Houses burn, find a way to put them out, don't just plan on creating new ones.
        • 50656E6973 7y ago
• Balgair 7y ago
  I feel that we're going to view these places and these practices the same way we view children in coal mines or young women working with radium paint. I've got a feeling that though we know very little about this now, our children and grandchildren are going to know a lot about this. Dear Lord, what a horrible thing.
• bksenior 7y ago
  You ever read Upton Sinclair's the jungle? It's a tale as old as time. Just publicly shame the company and ultimately they change or congress passes laws. This is a major reason the media works this way, it's part of American democracy.
  • bagacrap 7y ago
    There's a key difference there: the practices described in the jungle directly affected the population at large, by way of the food they ate. The kind of exposé in tfa requires the masses to have collective empathy.
    • memmcgee 7y ago
      The population at large is heavily affected by Facebook as well.
    • officialchicken 7y ago
      While "Mary had a little lamb" may be the part everyone remembers - and is THE REASON why the FDA was founded - the book spends more time discussing exploiting labor (unions and busting them); the role of banks in predatory housing; the role of transportation networks in segregation; and all kinds of issues related to immigration, education, and public health.
  • sharkmerry 7y ago
    I believe Sinclair's goal with the jungle was to expose the working condition for the benefit of the workers but the takeaway was how disgusting our food was
    • mortenjorck 7y ago
      In the author's own words: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
  • president 7y ago
    > Just publicly shame the company and ultimately they change or congress passes laws. This just doesn't work in today's world. If it did, Equifax wouldn't be thriving the way it still does today.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• cronix 7y ago
  Don't fret, FB mods. You'll soon be replaced by algorithms so you won't have to do this much longer. You know, by those people making a min of 4x what you do and look down upon you. They'll tell ya to learn to code as they chuckle under their breath.
• solidsnack9000 7y ago
  I asked him what he thought needed to change. “I think Facebook needs to shut down,” he said.
• gopher2 7y ago
  Would be interested in seeing some kind of legislation where content moderation jobs that deal with XYZ categories of content must be compensate at least some % downtime/recovery. So e.g. in an 8 hour day you can only spend 4 hours a day doing moderation, and 4 hours of 'paid mental preparation' for doing the moderation work.
• gerbilly 7y ago
  This might be an opportunity for facebook to do a lot of real good for the world. They should have an investigative unit that tracks down the source of this material and partners with law enforcement so we can catch the bastards doing and posting this horrible stuff.
• saagarjha 7y ago
  > Work stopped while we were there to ensure we did not see any Facebook user’s personal information. Do users know that their personal information is being looked through by employees who don't work for Facebook?
• thtthings 7y ago
  All this content reprograms our brain. Even if a sane person works for FB for content moderation they will be screwed up pretty soon. I am so glad i am not on facebook since 2008. If you think it's not messing with you, THINK AGAIN. Facebook is the worst thing that happened to us, except for Mark and it's employees
• starpilot 7y ago
  How much of this originates with FB/Cognizant? This seems mostly characteristic of other low-paying job work environments. You're not going to get the cultural elite paying $15/hour. You get desperate people with patterns of maladaptive behavior and dysfunctions. You get horseplay, various illnesses that come from bad home environments, and overall balls of stress that are just looking for a job, any job.
• deogeo 7y ago
  Yet another case where NDAs are abused to cover-up corporate misdeeds. I think their enforcability should be severely restricted. With penalties if a lawyer includes them in a contract, despite knowing they are invalid, so invalid terms can't be used to scare workers not familiar with the law.
• bpyne 7y ago
  From the article, we don't know how much a moderator "can take" daily. Perhaps studies haven't been done. Perhaps it's too complicated a subject for good tests. But, they could check with organizations who have experience already with employees having to watch horrific crimes. The chief information security officer in my organization came from our state police where he headed the internet crimes against children division. People on his team had to watch videos like the ones described in the article. Despite having all hardened officers on his team, team members regularly cried at their desks while watching videos. His team members had to be taken off-duty for weeks every six months to recover. They had mandatory counseling even when off-duty. I would think FB and other large companies could look at the measures taken by police forces with similarly disturbing jobs as a guideline for the contractors.
• aboru 7y ago
  I am surprised after reading a lot of comments here (not all), that I have not seen any discussion of Cognizant and their role. I am no fan of Facebook and I believe that they have significant responsibility here, but the contractor is, imo, the party directly responsible. These people do not work for Facebook, and we don't know the nature of the contract in play. Are they paying per person, or a lump sum for some capacity at some accuracy rate. If Cognizant automated all of this would it be accepted under the contract? Anyways, I don't want to shift focus away from Facebook so much as wanting to recognize the contracted call mpanies like Cognizant (which is what the whole article is about btw, with some comments referring to Facebook). Accenture and Cognizant really shouldn't escape the scrutiny just for being overshadowed by a bigger name.
  • colpabar 7y ago
    Cognizant isn't in the headline and unfortunately most people don't actually read things.
  • kshacker 7y ago
    If the same article was about Apple and a subcon (not Foxconn) where do you think the limelight will be?
  • johnrbent 7y ago
    Facebook is the entity creating this work, and is the root of the problem (by contracting a 3rd party to perform work that they very well understand the consequences of). The article is suggesting that Facebook should be held accountable for the detriment (trauma) that their work is causing. I think the article even argues that the contractors aren't equipped to deal with a problem of this magnitude/seriousness. Facebook is in the best position to rectify their moral accounts, but we all know that's not going to happen because they are evil and so forth.
  • danso 7y ago
    It's true that Cognizant has direct power to change things, but ultimately, the buck stops with Facebook, since they seem to be the vast majority of Cognizant's work and thus essentially have direct control of the purse strings. FB has the ability to change how Cognizant treats its workforce, and it's Facebook's choice to take a stand or to wash its hands of it. FB also has indirect say in demanding a certain standard ("98% accuracy target") for a given amount of money ($200M) -- though obviously if FB were to simply pay Cognizant more for the contract, there's no guarantee Cognizant would use that money for better worker pay/benefits (as opposed to giving bigger bonuses to executives, for example). In the article, one of the contractors says that Cognizant puts up a "dog-and-pony show" whenever FB executives visit. Again, it's ultimately up to FB to decide how much they want to push past the facade.
• neuro 7y ago
  Social Media Content Moderation Team Lead Cognizant Technology Solutions Tampa, Florida • This is an exempt position, requiring day, evening, weekend, and holiday shifts, as this delivery center is operational 24/7 and 365 days a year. Cognizant is seeking a team of strong Team Leads to manage a team of social media content moderators for a global social media organization. The Team Lead will be responsible not only for managing day to day operations of the team, people management, performance management, but also help the client determine gaps in processes, identifying innovative ways to solve problems upstream and scale our operations. Ideal candidates will be comfortable understanding social media, have an appetite for research and gathering data insights, a high level of comfort working with cross-functional partners, and a strong analytical mindset. Successful team members have a passion for business success, strong attention to detail, analytical problem-solving abilities keeping a high level of team motivation and keen eyes for operational inefficiencies. Responsibilities: • Provide mentorship, guidance and career development to members of your team • Lead a high-performing team through an exciting transition to build problem solving, critical thinking, analytical and technical capabilities which will enable the department to develop deeper, more scalable solutions • Team management responsibilities for a market team, whilst also serving as a cross-functional and a global liaison in developed areas of expertise • Establish team goals and work with direct reports on strategies for executing, measuring progress and sharing results • Deliver projects involving quantitative analysis, industry research, and strategy development, working directly with global cross-functional teams to problem solve analytical approaches and develop solutions • Identify actionable insights, suggest recommendations, and influence team strategy through effective communication • Advocate for users within their market, partnering with global and cross-functional teams to develop global solutions
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• neuro 7y ago
  This seems to be the place Cognizant Technology Solutions Woodlands2 7725 Woodland Center Blvd, Tampa, FL 33614 There's another big story here, it may get more horrific, from browsing their phone directory most of their "employees" appear to be people of south Asian nationality. Given the circumstances and their predatory behavior, I imagine they are also taking advantage of H1Bs.
  • dRaBoQ 7y ago
    Where do you see their phone directory ?
• neilv 7y ago
  Where is the Facebook walkout, to demand humane working conditions for everyone at Facebook and its contractors?
• ljm 7y ago
  I think this is also a symptom of the US’ shocking attitude to worker’s rights. The article says staff were constantly reminded of how easily replaced they were, which is a euphemism for “you’re lucky we gave you a job.” Facebook and Cognizant are majorly dropping the ball but US government and legislation strongly enables that. As do individual states. From a European perspective this is a sad article to read about work conditions in “the greatest nation in the world.”
• wrongdonf 7y ago
  PSA: I watched a video and I got PTSD. I used to casually browse a subreddit called watch people die. In 2016 I watched a video on that subreddit that gave me ptsd. At that point in time I had watched probably hundreds of intensely graphic videos, and the total pieces of intensely violent media I had consumed probably numbered in the thousands. I had been into it since 2008. I did it because of morbid curiosity. At first I scrolled through the comments and noticed something very unusual: very emphatic comments warning people that videos can give you ptsd. Most videos have comments where people talk about how “I couldn’t even finish it” or whatever, so I brushed it off. After watching the video I immediately knew something was wrong. My body felt strange. My mind was in a state of hyper-tension or vigilance. It’s very difficult to describe. I also noticed that my libido would come and go in waves. I would go from not feeling any sexual feelings to being more horny than I’ve ever been in my life. I knew that something deep inside of me had been deeply affected. I went to sleep without much trouble. When I woke up I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I felt something coming over me. A sensation of panic. It surprised me because it was out of the blue and I’ve never felt something like that before. I then entered a full blown panic attack, which rocked me so hard that I fled the bathroom and threw myself on the couch. It passed, but I was drowning in anxiety and a sensation of doom. At this point I knew that I may have permanently fucked myself. I was scared. but I still had to go to work. I spent the next few weeks forcing myself through each workday while being suffocated by an overwhelming sensation of doom, anxiety and panic. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done. But I got through it. I noticed many things that I later learned are indicative of ptsd: having your eyes lock up, feeling ready to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, an intense desire to subdue the anxiety with alcohol and drugs. I would walk down the street like an insane person, ready to rage on anyone who even looked at me wrong, and I had no history of anything like this. I never had bad nightmares or trouble getting to or staying asleep, so I think I had some kind of light beer ptsd. But it was hell on earth. Everything I had heard about veterans losing their jobs and killing themselves all of a sudden made so much sense. Take it from me: ptsd is one of the worst things that can happen to you. And I didn’t even have full blown ptsd. I got help from a few therapists, and they informed me that if my symptoms persisted more than a month or something, I would technically have ptsd. Other than that, the therapists were basically of no help whatsoever. The symptoms lasted well beyond three months. As time went on, the symptoms got better. They seem to have stabilized now. If I’m distracted, I feel normal. But if my mind is idle then my thoughts always go back to it and with those thoughts comes the anxiety. Long drives can be uncomfortable. I’m at a state now where I’m in the clear: the symptoms are weak enough that they don’t threaten my ability to work and bathe and etc. and my ability to recognize and cope with the symptoms has increased a lot too. But it still bothers me sometimes and I am keeping my eye out for breakthrough treatments. Sgb and mdma look promising. A thought can either be in your mind or not. When I’m feeling symptoms, it’s almost like the memories are somewhere in my mind, lurking. But other times they aren’t around. It’s like they have a life of their own. It’s something you don’t have control over. The best coping mechanism I’ve found so far is meditation sort of. I think that part of ptsd is that your mind is fighting to block the memories and their emotional consequences. So when I feel symptoms I let my mind be open to any and all thoughts or memories. I totally relinquish control of my own thoughts and whatever comes into my mind, I allow it to come and then I watch it pass on. Opening the mind and simply observing the thoughts. This dramatically reduces the severity of my symptoms and often leads my mind to organically become preoccupied with something else. It’s strange to think that a video can be so dangerous. But they can be. I was a grizzled veteran of gore videos and I thought surely that if they damaged the mind, I would have noticed a long time ago. Some videos, especially high definition ones, can for sure fuck you up. If you have children, don’t allow them access to the internet unfiltered. I saw this video on Reddit for Christ sake.
• Havoc 7y ago
  Even second hand in article format that’s disturbing. A classic sweatshop operations except it also destroys the slaves psyche on top of it. Two parties weren’t really mentioned. The executives that set up the operation and the people posting the content. Both must be pretty twisted
• nonwifehaver3 7y ago
  I haven't used Facebook since 2012 so maybe I'm missing something. When someone posts a video of them torturing a dog under their own name, or some other sick thing, does that not cause some sort of problem with their friends and local community? Many would permanently block and ostracize an acquaintance for such a thing. Why does nobody call the police on someone like that, especially when they know their work/address/etc in real life? I guess I don't understand the key change in the medium or the culture that requires Facebook's ponderous rule tome and 10000 anonymous content moderators in Manila or Phoenix. Is this just about the risk of some corporate ad being next to some undesired content for a few page views?
• averros 7y ago
  Oh, and the simple thought of refraining from censorship and giving users the tools to self-sanitize their feeds never actually crossed the Facebook mgmt's minds. Because, apparently, Facebook is not only about stalking the users and manipulating them into buying more stuff they don't need, but also about manipulating them into believing into the "right" stories and voting for the "right" people. All of which makes censorship - both algorithmic and human-based - a must. Another take-out from the article (for Facebook users): your perception of reality is being shaped by the kind of people who can't (or can't be bothered to) find a better job paying $15/hr.
• firefocus 7y ago
  Basically you get paid $15 an hour to poison your subconscious mind which is 95% of your life. Absolutely unethical.
• firefocus 7y ago
  Basically, you get paid $15 an hour to poison your subconscious mind. Absolutely unethical. Facebook should not be allowed to hide behind subcontractors.
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Funny how Zuck and even Bezos have this worker problem coming up all the time. Their making a lot of money, can they not at least make working conditions decent? Too much to ask?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• unicornherder 7y ago
  I didn’t even realize that they had human mods. Interesting!
• mahgnous 7y ago
  Disgusting that companies use NDA’s to abuse their employees like this.
• HPSUCKME 7y ago
  HP is why noone can have nice things. Let me fix this for you OP. "The person responsible for managing YOURCOMPANY's growing contractor workforce is Arun Chandra, whose title is vice president of WHATEVER. Chandra arrived at YOURCOMPANY last November after a long career at HP, where he helped to oversee the company’s global supply chain. In his new role, he told me, he hopes to gradually INCREASE OUTSOURCING TO 100%."
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• HPSUCKME 7y ago
  Any leadership by EX HP employees truely enriches a company. I am very impressed. Thanks for removing my previous post.
• mythrwy 7y ago
  Why are the same videos coming up again and again? Of everything, that seems like an easy problem to solve.
• kadira 7y ago
  Fucking you all the cunts working for FB, find a better job fucking cunts.
• anentropic 7y ago
  sounds like the workers need a union
• prirun 7y ago
  The article mentioned that "In May, Facebook announced that it will raise contractor wages by $3 an hour". If Facebook is dictating the wages of content moderators, then it is an employer, and all of these "contractors" should be reclassified as such, with Facebook paying all back wages, benefits, etc. Here are some other ideas: Instead of having content moderators watch 200 of these videos per day, distribute the load over the entire Facebook workforce. Or, when a content moderator flags a video for removal, verify that by making a regular Facebook employee watch the video to confirm the removal. This should increase the accuracy rate above the 98% threshold Facebook has set. That should put a finer point on the problem. I could barely read descriptions of these videos. There's no way I could watch one, let alone 200 a day. This work is like being in a war, and they should be paid like a soldier who is risking their life / mental health.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mengmeng 7y ago
  Dear Facebook Employees and Zuckerberg: More than the other megas, you claim moral highground. You have a passion culture where people `actually believe` they are doing something great. To this day, even with the retarded masses and corrupt congress thinking something is wrong, you `still believe` this. So where the fruit of your labor. Where has the blessings of your existence improved the lives of the unfortunate? where? where? im asking you right now reading this looking into your eyes. where? well we've heard the line that the tech isn't there yet. or how you have learned from past attempts to help and are taking more targeted approaches. ok, that works for the retarded masses and corrupt congress. but I call bullshit. its actually more than that, its malicious intentional lying. you know how you can help? heres a really easy way. take some of your money, give it to these slave/content-moderators. 100,000 to you is not 100,000 to them. how much would you need to pay me to watch that shit? zuck man, you can't give me your salary to watch that. that shit damages you for life. and you think its worth whatever? yall walk around (figuratively, on the internet) like you have something to be proud of. donald abraham is confident as shit. but you know, yall are just like any other mega. sure each mega has its own demographic. but the entire reason for the existance of a mega ensures 100% you will engage in unethical behavior. and you will recreate the extremely oppressive society we live in everyday. Furthermore, you will recreate the belief in the opposite: things aren't so bad and we `good peoples`
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