13 ms·

> 5. Offer real healthcare and psychiatric care. Facebook employees enjoy various benefits, including private health insurance and visits to psychiatrists. Cont

by monkin 6y ago

> 5. Offer real healthcare and psychiatric care. Facebook employees enjoy various benefits, including private health insurance and visits to psychiatrists. Content moderators, who bear the brunt of the mental health trauma associated with Facebook’s toxic content, are offered 45 minutes a week with a ‘wellness coach’. These ‘coaches’ are generally not psychologists or psychiatrists and are contractually forbidden from diagnosis or treatment. And they generally cannot build a relationship of trust with moderators, since workers know that Facebook management (and Accenture/CPL management) ask ‘coaches’ to reveal confidential details of counselling sessions. Moderators deserve at least as much mental and physical health support as full Facebook staff. Low pay and no psychiatric help with that kind of content?! This is just outrageous. Mark should moderate this stuff by himself to see how huge burden it is. And, this is not Rotten or Goatse type of shock it’s entirely different level.

johnchristopher 6y ago
Even with trained psychologists or psychiatrists there's a limit to how many times you can put your hands in the fire before it's impossible to craft some skin back.
zentiggr 6y ago
I'd love to see everyone in Facebook's chain of command above the moderators being required to do a week worth of the actual moderating. Then let them say in public that they're doing their best for their employees.
- grecy 6y ago
  I agree with you wholeheartedly, but capitalism has allowed this kind of thing for generations. Mining magnates should be forced to work at the coalface. The Waltons should be forced to stock shelves, Bezos should be in the distribution centres. The list is endless, and unfortunately this is nothing new. The best we can do is minimum wage laws and unions to try and "negotiate" with billionaires to give us a crumb.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    Interesting that you're getting downvoted with a comment that touches on the core of capitalism, or at least points out one of its main pitfalls.
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      It doesn't really add anything to this conversation. "Blame Capitalism" is all the rave, but it doesn't really fit with this argument. There is a lot going on here. One, this is a letter to Facebook when it really seems to be the contracting agency that's at issue. FB may just order their contractors to be like "stop this shit" and they comply, or they buy out the contract and move people in-house. People only have so much time and capacities. A software engineer isn't going to spend a lot of time on the sales room floor, but they might have started off in help-desk support. A CEO might not know what goes on in the warehouse, but he or she may have worked at a McDonalds growing up. If someone hasn't worked entry level jobs elsewhere, would working on the factory really develop empathy? Would that change policy? Probably not. It's so easy to make two boxes, one for the oppressor and the other for the oppressed, and place everyone into those two boxes. If each oppressor works a day in the shoes of the other box, does that make a difference? If the workers throw their wrenches into the gears and seize the means of production, what if they're completely unprepared to keep that machine moving and end up with famine? The issues are complex, much more complex than "Before you get your license, you should have to ride a bike on the streets for two weeks."
      - dao- 6y ago
        > It's so easy to make two boxes, one for the oppressor and the other for the oppressed, and place everyone into those two boxes. If each oppressor works a day in the shoes of the other box, does that make a difference? You've got a point there. The capitalist will most likely continue to act as a capitalist. The incentives are fundamentally wrong, so moralizing on an individual level won't do much, which brings us back to: blame capitalism.
      - hypervisorxxx 6y ago
        Zuckerberg has been to trial in washington and had to speak about AI approaches. This is not the first second or third time international news has been made making objective statements about the technical failures of the product facebook is wants it's moderators to use. To say he has not been made aware and had the opportunity to address these issues over years is giving him too much credit. Blame capitalism is all the rave. So are companies hiding from responsibility. Shell companies shell companies to evade responsibility and incing their companies on remote islands they clearly don't primarily operate on to evade taxes and giving abuses NDAs which effectively offer full silence regardless of any federal felonies committed or else they take severence or healthcare taken away. Companies can do whatever they want under an NDA and sue anyone to the point even if they did something very illegal, they still wouldn't be liable because the fact that someone spoke about it is illegal in the same way a VC investor was caught beating a woman 300 times in a row as she tried to escape the guys san Francisco mansion but the evidence was thrown out because it was obtained illegally and he got a $500 fine instead. Blame capitalism exists because publicly shaming companies away from egregious abuses even to the point of being often illegal is the only way to have some type of check and balance and it always takes a few people beginning by speaking out and losing their jobs and getting nothing for it before the masses come to agreement and hold companies responsible for better practices. Unfortunately this is not just a fun trend. It's a reaction that attempts to check and balance abuses and it often only happens after many yrs and many people have gone silent and a few have chosen to take the risk and speak out. We should definitely have something better than blame capitalism but to say it just appeared out of the blue is a bit misleading.
- computronus 6y ago
  Related is Joel Spolsky's story about the Sergeant Major who wasn't above cleaning a toilet: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/06/20/introduction-to-best-software-writing-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/06/20/introduction-to-be... "On the first day he took me to the officer’s bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. 'Here’s how you clean a toilet,' he said. "And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl, in his pressed starched spotless dress uniform, and scrubbed the toilet with his bare hands. "To a 19 year old who has to clean toilets, something which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high ranking, 38 year old, immaculate, manicured, pampered discipline officer cleaning a toilet completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. That’s leadership."
  - pdonis 6y ago
    I had a similar experience while I was in the Navy. A new Chief Engineer came aboard, and I happened to be the watch officer the next time we lighted off the boiler in preparation for getting underway. He told me he was going to go with me to do a pre-light off inspection. He literally covered every square inch of the boiler room and engine room, crawling into bilges, peering behind equipment, poking into crevices, making absolutely sure there were no safety hazards. An excellent case of leading by example.
  - jeffrallen 6y ago
    I knew one guy, way back when, who even got down on his knees and cleaned other people's feet. That guy rocked. Super-good leader.
    - Agentlien 6y ago
      Wait, how old are you?!
    - krapp 6y ago
      His dad was kind of a jerk, though.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Sociopaths aren't going to suffer like actual humans.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    If somebody goes through what the moderators have to see and apparently isn't affected by it, that is it's own even bigger red flag.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Some years ago a relative of mine was hired to be a Regional VP for a very large restaurant chain. As part of that training he had to spend literally weeks of time learning the basics in each role in a restaurant, from waiting tables to cook, to (end-user) cleaning & maintenance of equipment, assistant manager, general manager, regional manager, to their position. I've always thought that was a fantastic form of training, and spoke strongly to the fact that the chain has been around since WW II.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    McDonald's franchise owners have to do the same thing. You have to be an owner/operator, not an owner/investor.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      It makes a lot of sense. How can you be in charge of running a business when you don't know how the parts work and what it means for an employee to have to perform their duties?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  I've long thought this could be a competitive advantage for people to do "rotations" on different roles. Building tools for moderators? Do a week moderating. Building tools for salespeople? Do a week as a salesperson. You're a salesperson who needs tools built for you? Do a week on the dev team.
  - x87678r 6y ago
    Just wait until SoX compliance people find out about that.
    - bostonvaulter2 6y ago
      Not all roles/companies are covered by SoX so a blanket dismissal of the idea is not helpful to the discussion.
    - wsinks 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can't do the work for a week because they aren't the right skill to do the work? I don't have a ton of experience with SoX compliance specifically.
      - throwaway201103 6y ago
        It's probably more that people who don't have the right training/have not passed various exams and certifications are not allowed to do certain things in finance. You can't sell securites if you haven't passed the Series 7 exams, for example.
      - x87678r 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties#Application_in_information_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties#Applicati...
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    I once worked at a company that did something like that. It was optional, but once a year you could spend 3 days working in first-line customer service. A CS rep oversaw your responses, but you got an ordinary account in the customer service system and dealt with real customers. The first two days you spent replying to customers, and the third day you spent prototyping or writing up some way that you thought common complaints could be addressed by making changes to the product. It was a nearly unmitigated boon to the company. Sure, the company saw it as paying for a few extra vacation days. But the program stuck around because it generated a lot of good ideas, and the direct communication between CS and product development teams was valuable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rock_hard 6y ago
  Leadership at FB actually does that 1-2 a year for a couple days
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Not enough (and definitely not the outsourced moderation work, which is literally the worst job in the world).
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Definitely not enough if they don't understand just how much they're pushing these moderators to desperation and breakdowns. A couple of days is not enough to get the gravity of the situation. Spend a week or more looking at the filth that needs filtering and you might start to get a sense of what the mods deal with and how badly it can affect them. Maybe.
yeetman21 6y ago
I don't mean to be mean and I support the plight of the moderators but this is just simple supply and demand. What are the skill required to be a moderator: eyesight and motor functions. Who has those skills: almost everyone. What will the companies therefore pay: almost nothing. I think the best thing that can happen to those jobs are they they are automated out of existence with AI, or heavily reduced,
- helmholtz 6y ago
  You don't mean to be mean, but then follow it up with such a tasteless and repugnant comment. God help those in your life if this really is your attitude towards living, breathing humans.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    Next level: It's actually the AI defending itself.
    - bentcorner 6y ago
      More realistically, the AI promotes content that improves itself and buries content that makes itself weaker.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - baxtr 6y ago
    Your reply can be categorized as “ad hominem” I believe?
    - esja 6y ago
      Quite close but generally ad hominem would be: "You are an awful person and therefore your argument is wrong". The second piece is missing here.
kukx 6y ago
The resources are limited. What is better, employ more people with a smaller pay or less people with a higher pay. I understand that this kind of job is not for everyone. And I assume the potential employees are well informed about it. And if it is worse than they expected they may look for another job? I just think there is enough people able to do that kind of job without experiencing any significant mental ill effects.
EE84M3i 6y ago
I'm unfortunately familiar with goatse, but what do you mean by "Rotten"?
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Rotten.com, basically a shock/gore site from the 90s/2000s. The Rotten Library was actually a fascinating place, though: https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/whatsnew/index.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/whatsnew/index...
  - ericlewis 6y ago
    I wasn't aware of this, thanks!
- ericlewis 6y ago
  rotten dot com used to be a pretty messed up place with all sorts of gore and all that on it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

by monkin 6y ago

johnchristopher 6y ago

Even with trained psychologists or psychiatrists there's a limit to how many times you can put your hands in the fire before it's impossible to craft some skin back.

zentiggr 6y ago

I'd love to see everyone in Facebook's chain of command above the moderators being required to do a week worth of the actual moderating. Then let them say in public that they're doing their best for their employees.

grecy 6y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but capitalism has allowed this kind of thing for generations. Mining magnates should be forced to work at the coalface. The Waltons should be forced to stock shelves, Bezos should be in the distribution centres. The list is endless, and unfortunately this is nothing new. The best we can do is minimum wage laws and unions to try and "negotiate" with billionaires to give us a crumb.
- spurgu 6y ago
  Interesting that you're getting downvoted with a comment that touches on the core of capitalism, or at least points out one of its main pitfalls.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    It doesn't really add anything to this conversation. "Blame Capitalism" is all the rave, but it doesn't really fit with this argument. There is a lot going on here. One, this is a letter to Facebook when it really seems to be the contracting agency that's at issue. FB may just order their contractors to be like "stop this shit" and they comply, or they buy out the contract and move people in-house. People only have so much time and capacities. A software engineer isn't going to spend a lot of time on the sales room floor, but they might have started off in help-desk support. A CEO might not know what goes on in the warehouse, but he or she may have worked at a McDonalds growing up. If someone hasn't worked entry level jobs elsewhere, would working on the factory really develop empathy? Would that change policy? Probably not. It's so easy to make two boxes, one for the oppressor and the other for the oppressed, and place everyone into those two boxes. If each oppressor works a day in the shoes of the other box, does that make a difference? If the workers throw their wrenches into the gears and seize the means of production, what if they're completely unprepared to keep that machine moving and end up with famine? The issues are complex, much more complex than "Before you get your license, you should have to ride a bike on the streets for two weeks."
    - dao- 6y ago
      > It's so easy to make two boxes, one for the oppressor and the other for the oppressed, and place everyone into those two boxes. If each oppressor works a day in the shoes of the other box, does that make a difference? You've got a point there. The capitalist will most likely continue to act as a capitalist. The incentives are fundamentally wrong, so moralizing on an individual level won't do much, which brings us back to: blame capitalism.
    - hypervisorxxx 6y ago
      Zuckerberg has been to trial in washington and had to speak about AI approaches. This is not the first second or third time international news has been made making objective statements about the technical failures of the product facebook is wants it's moderators to use. To say he has not been made aware and had the opportunity to address these issues over years is giving him too much credit. Blame capitalism is all the rave. So are companies hiding from responsibility. Shell companies shell companies to evade responsibility and incing their companies on remote islands they clearly don't primarily operate on to evade taxes and giving abuses NDAs which effectively offer full silence regardless of any federal felonies committed or else they take severence or healthcare taken away. Companies can do whatever they want under an NDA and sue anyone to the point even if they did something very illegal, they still wouldn't be liable because the fact that someone spoke about it is illegal in the same way a VC investor was caught beating a woman 300 times in a row as she tried to escape the guys san Francisco mansion but the evidence was thrown out because it was obtained illegally and he got a $500 fine instead. Blame capitalism exists because publicly shaming companies away from egregious abuses even to the point of being often illegal is the only way to have some type of check and balance and it always takes a few people beginning by speaking out and losing their jobs and getting nothing for it before the masses come to agreement and hold companies responsible for better practices. Unfortunately this is not just a fun trend. It's a reaction that attempts to check and balance abuses and it often only happens after many yrs and many people have gone silent and a few have chosen to take the risk and speak out. We should definitely have something better than blame capitalism but to say it just appeared out of the blue is a bit misleading.
computronus 6y ago
Related is Joel Spolsky's story about the Sergeant Major who wasn't above cleaning a toilet: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/06/20/introduction-to-best-software-writing-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/06/20/introduction-to-be... "On the first day he took me to the officer’s bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. 'Here’s how you clean a toilet,' he said. "And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl, in his pressed starched spotless dress uniform, and scrubbed the toilet with his bare hands. "To a 19 year old who has to clean toilets, something which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high ranking, 38 year old, immaculate, manicured, pampered discipline officer cleaning a toilet completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. That’s leadership."
- pdonis 6y ago
  I had a similar experience while I was in the Navy. A new Chief Engineer came aboard, and I happened to be the watch officer the next time we lighted off the boiler in preparation for getting underway. He told me he was going to go with me to do a pre-light off inspection. He literally covered every square inch of the boiler room and engine room, crawling into bilges, peering behind equipment, poking into crevices, making absolutely sure there were no safety hazards. An excellent case of leading by example.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  I knew one guy, way back when, who even got down on his knees and cleaned other people's feet. That guy rocked. Super-good leader.
  - Agentlien 6y ago
    Wait, how old are you?!
  - krapp 6y ago
    His dad was kind of a jerk, though.
rodgerd 6y ago
Sociopaths aren't going to suffer like actual humans.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  If somebody goes through what the moderators have to see and apparently isn't affected by it, that is it's own even bigger red flag.
ineedasername 6y ago
Some years ago a relative of mine was hired to be a Regional VP for a very large restaurant chain. As part of that training he had to spend literally weeks of time learning the basics in each role in a restaurant, from waiting tables to cook, to (end-user) cleaning & maintenance of equipment, assistant manager, general manager, regional manager, to their position. I've always thought that was a fantastic form of training, and spoke strongly to the fact that the chain has been around since WW II.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  McDonald's franchise owners have to do the same thing. You have to be an owner/operator, not an owner/investor.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It makes a lot of sense. How can you be in charge of running a business when you don't know how the parts work and what it means for an employee to have to perform their duties?
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I've long thought this could be a competitive advantage for people to do "rotations" on different roles. Building tools for moderators? Do a week moderating. Building tools for salespeople? Do a week as a salesperson. You're a salesperson who needs tools built for you? Do a week on the dev team.
- x87678r 6y ago
  Just wait until SoX compliance people find out about that.
  - bostonvaulter2 6y ago
    Not all roles/companies are covered by SoX so a blanket dismissal of the idea is not helpful to the discussion.
  - wsinks 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can't do the work for a week because they aren't the right skill to do the work? I don't have a ton of experience with SoX compliance specifically.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      It's probably more that people who don't have the right training/have not passed various exams and certifications are not allowed to do certain things in finance. You can't sell securites if you haven't passed the Series 7 exams, for example.
    - x87678r 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties#Application_in_information_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties#Applicati...
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  I once worked at a company that did something like that. It was optional, but once a year you could spend 3 days working in first-line customer service. A CS rep oversaw your responses, but you got an ordinary account in the customer service system and dealt with real customers. The first two days you spent replying to customers, and the third day you spent prototyping or writing up some way that you thought common complaints could be addressed by making changes to the product. It was a nearly unmitigated boon to the company. Sure, the company saw it as paying for a few extra vacation days. But the program stuck around because it generated a lot of good ideas, and the direct communication between CS and product development teams was valuable.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rock_hard 6y ago
Leadership at FB actually does that 1-2 a year for a couple days
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Not enough (and definitely not the outsourced moderation work, which is literally the worst job in the world).
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Definitely not enough if they don't understand just how much they're pushing these moderators to desperation and breakdowns. A couple of days is not enough to get the gravity of the situation. Spend a week or more looking at the filth that needs filtering and you might start to get a sense of what the mods deal with and how badly it can affect them. Maybe.

yeetman21 6y ago

I don't mean to be mean and I support the plight of the moderators but this is just simple supply and demand. What are the skill required to be a moderator: eyesight and motor functions. Who has those skills: almost everyone. What will the companies therefore pay: almost nothing. I think the best thing that can happen to those jobs are they they are automated out of existence with AI, or heavily reduced,

helmholtz 6y ago
You don't mean to be mean, but then follow it up with such a tasteless and repugnant comment. God help those in your life if this really is your attitude towards living, breathing humans.
- spurgu 6y ago
  Next level: It's actually the AI defending itself.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    More realistically, the AI promotes content that improves itself and buries content that makes itself weaker.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- baxtr 6y ago
  Your reply can be categorized as “ad hominem” I believe?
  - esja 6y ago
    Quite close but generally ad hominem would be: "You are an awful person and therefore your argument is wrong". The second piece is missing here.

kukx 6y ago

The resources are limited. What is better, employ more people with a smaller pay or less people with a higher pay. I understand that this kind of job is not for everyone. And I assume the potential employees are well informed about it. And if it is worse than they expected they may look for another job? I just think there is enough people able to do that kind of job without experiencing any significant mental ill effects.

EE84M3i 6y ago

I'm unfortunately familiar with goatse, but what do you mean by "Rotten"?

pavel_lishin 6y ago
Rotten.com, basically a shock/gore site from the 90s/2000s. The Rotten Library was actually a fascinating place, though: https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/whatsnew/index.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/whatsnew/index...
- ericlewis 6y ago
  I wasn't aware of this, thanks!
ericlewis 6y ago
rotten dot com used to be a pretty messed up place with all sorts of gore and all that on it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]