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Facebook's African Sweatshop

poiujyhh 5y ago
https://archive.md/Cw9Ty https://archive.md/Cw9Ty This company has the image of helping lift people out of poverty - I think they are doing good work. The article shows though that if nothing else there is a danger of trying to go with a "we're different and better" corporate image because the truth is often murkier
- Etheryte 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever heard of anyone projecting that image onto Facebook. Perhaps I simply live in a different context, but this raised both of my eyebrows pretty high.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Seeing as the account that made the post was created moments before the post was made makes it super suspect as well.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      The post starts to with a link trashing both Facebook and Sama. If they're a corporate shill, they're shit at their job.
  - throwaway765433 5y ago
    GP probably referring to Sama, not Facebook.
FinNerd 5y ago
They should earn $15/hr. The faster we impose a global minimum wage (or harsh sanctions on violators) the better. Also surprised there aren’t more content moderators. FB (just FB alone for now due to them being a monopoly) should be required, IMHO, to review every piece of content before it is shown in a feed using human review. We don’t let movies get shown before they get reviewed (e.g. PG13).
- allisdust 5y ago
  And why $15? Should they pay that much in a really poor country. What about a really rich one (may be Switzerland)? End of the day quality of living is totally dependent on local conditions (barring gadgets like ipricy)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- madsmith 5y ago
  That is entirely untrue. So many student films, home movies, YouTube posts get shown before human review. You seem to be wildly underestimating the complexity of the task and the long tail of content creation. There are 1.9 billion daily users. You’re asking to REQUIRE a human content moderation system that reviews 100% of the continent that 1.9 billion users can create a day? Before that content can get shown? I don’t see a feasible way of creating a system like that which will serve the needs of those 1.9 billion users in a way that will seem remotely tolerable to them, that can timely share their content.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    If a company who already moderates a portion of their content claims that they're unable to moderate content due to scale, should we really accept that as a valid argument? Have we actually decided that "scale" is a good a justification for behaving badly, or are we simply accepting it without critical thought because we once respected those companies? IMO, companies do not have some inherent right to profitability, or even to remain in business, if they can't responsibly conduct their business.
    - blululu 5y ago
      Yes it is a valid argument. This is exactly why Ron Wyden wrote section 230 and why nobody has a replacement that isn’t suspect as a bill of attainder. A light amount moderation is easy. Doing that everywhere is hard. The same thing works for police. We police a portion of the city, but we don’t want or expect the police to cover every single inch of the city.
mmmBacon 5y ago
>>>Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021 Considering the size of the platform ~$130B/year; $5B per year spent on platform safety, while substantial, seems low as a percentage of revenue.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  It probably doesn't scale linearly with revenue.
- blululu 5y ago
  That’s much more than I would have expected. ~3.5% is a significant operating expense. Not sure why it should be higher. Most companies don’t spend that much on R&D for example (tech companies are exceptional in this regard).
  - neves 5y ago
    It looks like a low value for a content company. The terrible track record of FB in this regard clearly indicates that they aren't investing enough.
  - mmmBacon 5y ago
    I’d argue it’s sufficient I if the problem of moderating content was a non-issue. However the article points out the problematic nature of the way content moderation currently works. Given that content moderation is core to their business, I’d expect the percentage spend to be >5%. By comparison they spend about 2x on Oculus.
bArray 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is supposed to cause outrage or not. I know for example companies like Facebook recruit in places like Holland too [1]. I'm also aware that such jobs exist for checking child pornography too. These are not nice jobs, but they do need to be done. The important part is that people in these roles receive phycological support too, which I doubt they get when working for tech companies. I always thought that a better model for moderation would be to distribute the effort. There will be people in my social bubble with similar reactions to the same content and once an algorithm understands these connections, it can distribute the effort of moderation amongst these like-minded people. Another moderation tool would be to simply allow people to trade reputation (which has some value in terms of audience reach) for correctly tagging content. On a different note, if you outsource your censorship, you will undoubtedly end up being censored based on the political ideology of the person doing the censoring. [1] https://jobsfactor.eu/job/49057/dutch-content-moderator/ https://jobsfactor.eu/job/49057/dutch-content-moderator/
- vanusa 5y ago
  The important part is that people in these roles receive phycological support too, That may be "the important part", but the article is very clear about the fact that, in you know, actual reality -- the workers at this company definitely are not receiving meaningful support.
- ashwagary 5y ago
  I think African leaders should quickly realize Facebook doesnt need to necessarily operate or be available in their country. Protecting the local population from immoral companies is a priority/duty and some large companies need to be given ultimatums immediately. Importing the sickness of the Western countries is not a requirement for Africa to continue rapid development.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > There will be people in my social bubble with similar reactions to the same content I don't want reactionary right-wingers on Facebook moderating other reactionary right-wingers' content on Facebook.
- 5y ago
wdb 5y ago
I am wondering if the leadership of Facebook ever was doing this work? Maybe they should do all kind of roles within their company for at least a two days a year. So they get a feel what's going on the work floor
Havoc 5y ago
I really don’t get why there isn’t better automated filtering. There can’t be that many suicide vids etc floating around the internet. Catalog that sht once and use AI similar to YouTube and copyright detection. Sure there will remain a continued need for 2nd line humans but this really shouldn’t be this much of a mental sweatshop operation. Vids especially. Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily produce unique content Also FB being front and center on this issue seems to be a recurring theme…yet they aren’t even the big video destination
- notRobot 5y ago
  > Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily produce unique content And video is somehow less unique, and easier for AI to categorise and identify? > There can’t be that many suicide vids etc floating around the internet. So very little training material for the AI, then? > they aren’t even the big video destination More than 4 billion video views take place on Facebook every day. [0] I really despise FB. But you're trivializing the problem. [0] https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/ https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/
  - Havoc 5y ago
    >And video is somehow less unique This type of video - yes. You and I are both writing unique content right now. Redditors produce thousands of unique posts daily. There are only so many suicide videos on the internet though and the amount a person can produce per day is inherently limited. It follows that fingerprinting said videos should be feasible. >So very little training material for the AI, then? And? Youtube does this with a single example for copyright purposes. Not all algos have to be backprop DL
- ChefboyOG 5y ago
  I promise, if FB/other companies could automate this away, they 100% would. In general, it's easier for a computer vision system to recognize and filter a video that has already been banned--though, there is a constant arms race here as well--than it is for it to judge the content of a completely new video. That means that, for a huge number of cases, a human being will have to see the footage at least once. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not taking up for FB in this situation. I'm specifically clarifying the difficulty of using ML/DL in moderation systems.
mabbo 5y ago
Here is the crux of the problem, in my mind: Does Facebook have more of a prerogative to help people in Africa or to maximize profits/value for shareholders (primary among them, Zuckerberg)? And the answer is complicated. In an actual free-market system, Facebook would want to reduce costs because it wants to reduce prices to stay ahead of competition. But Facebook doesn't have much competition, or monetary prices. And so Facebook doesn't act like a competitive company, it acts like a monopoly maximizing its exploitation of a resource it controls. If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing its price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs. But it actually does the opposite. Which takes me back to the original question: When Facebook is in this market-power position, is it really it's prerogative just to make as much money as possible?
- chottocharaii 5y ago
  Regulation is obviously needed
- trasz 5y ago
  Personally I don't see how the choice between helping people and making money for shareholders could be any simpler.
- cosheaf 5y ago
  If you take this to its logical conclusion then you're essentially describing the paperclip maximizer from Bostrom's book about the dangers of artificially intelligent systems that destroy humanity at the expense of maximizing their own operation. Contemporary corporations are essentially paperclip maximizers.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  Yet another dark side of the “free”, or “user is the product”. This could be prevented by changing the law so that it treats any large enough social platform as a communication service provider, requiring it to provide open API with complete feature coverage. This would facilitate native feature-complete third-party cross-platform clients that don’t show any ads, and platforms would have to charge users because no one will be stupid enough not to use a client like that. And once service is no longer free and cross-platform clients exist, the space will finally start resembling an actual free market—honest competitors will stand a chance, and actual end users will be able to vote with their wallet.
pklee 5y ago
Radiolab had a similar post sometime back. That was about philippines - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-no-evil https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  They were similar articles written about subcontractors and their moderators in Ireland. This isn't just Africa and just Facebook. It's all social media. I guess the only ones that get away with a moderation made by unpaid volunteers at scale is reddit, since it's their entire business model. The real question is, what kind of individual is "moderating" that place...
  - toqy 5y ago
    Reddit has to have some kind of moderation other than the volunteer sub moderators, otherwise people could just illegal content in a private subreddit
someluccc 5y ago
This is such a disingenuous article. It’s not about facebook at all. It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work. It critiques working conditions without providing any context as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even average pay- jobs in those countries. Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone.
- jjulius 5y ago
  >It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work. Can you please cite a source for this claim? While it's true that Sama has partnerships with companies such as, according to the article and to Sama's website[1], Google, Microsoft and Wal-Mart, it's not entirely clear that they're also doing content moderation for all of them. They seem to offer a wide range of services. >Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment. [1]https://www.sama.com/ https://www.sama.com/
  - Proven 5y ago
  - Kalium 5y ago
    > Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment. Not precisely, but a person's choices should generally be considered in light of the alternatives reasonably available to them. If nothing else, it's often a great way to better understand the choices people make. Not every person has fast, easy, low-risk access to a six-figure USD SWE job with a YCombinator startup.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
burpee 5y ago
I interviewed a young man who was doing this kind of work for about six months in Ireland a while back for a completely different role. It was quite clearly mentally taxing and he broke down crying mid-interview. I ended up canceling my following meeting and talking through things with him. He was close to suicide, had cut contact with most people in his life and said that he hadn't been able to sleep or think straight since he started the work. Unfortunately I couldn't offer him any work, only a shoulder to cry on and a promise that there was beauty in the world as well. I never thought a job could do so much mental damage to someone, but these jobs are horrible.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No, these companies the people that upload/make the stuff are horrible, the jobs are merely a symptom. Any company, large or small, that allows uploads of image content without strict identity verification of the uploader is going to be a vehicle for this junk. I had a super popular website in this space, as soon as I figured out what was going on I shut it down, I am of the opinion that it is not possible to run a service like that in a responsible way without causing damage somewhere.
  - forkLding 5y ago
    What if you put in strict identity verification and the uploader is identified but still decided to upload a NSFW or disturbing image?
    - jaredmosley 5y ago
      Then, assuming those kinds of images are against your TOS, then you ban them. This drastically reduces the number of images of that nature that are uploaded not only by ensuring they can't do it again but also by heavily disincentivizing them from doing it in the first place.
      - alistairSH 5y ago
        Beyond that, if the content they post is illegal, there's a more clear path to prosecution than if the content is posted anonymously.
spoonjim 5y ago
Interesting to see that the vendor in question is Sama (formerly Samasource), which started out as a nonprofit but was then turned into a for-profit company (the founder has since passed away). Wonder if this was the catalyst for its corruption.
throwaways85989 5y ago
Thank you fb for advocating for religious extremism throughout the region. This kind of work surely is a great recruiting ground for anti-modern viewpoints and violent anti-western sentiments. https://africacenter.org/publication/islamist-extremism-east-africa/ https://africacenter.org/publication/islamist-extremism-east...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anovikov 5y ago
Well as for salaries, many people in countries that on paper look a lot more developed, make similar money. It's almost typical in provincial Russia.
delegate 5y ago
Genuine question: Who posts this content ? Are there really that many people who do this ? Can't they be banned on first offense ?
- bhelkey 5y ago
  > Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021. I suspect that Facebook does ban folks but that the people who do it attempt to get around the bans. If this could be solved by banning the people who do this, I imagine Facebook would have done that already and pocketed the 5 Billion dollars.
  - packetslave 5y ago
    Remember that guy who live-streamed his killing spree on Facebook a few years back? It got taken down. Hundreds of reposts of the video were automatically blocked before anyone saw them. The small percentage of reposts that DID make it to live? People modifying the video (flipping, cropping, re-encoding, etc) explicitly to get around the machine moderation. Those eventually got taken down by content moderators. There are a lot of shitty people out there doing shitty things to get attention.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Serious question to the people on this site who are employed by Facebook: Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most - ethically disgusting companies in the world? Do you guys just click "hide" on all these articles - on average 1-2 a day - where Facebook has committed yet another absolutely disgusting transgression?
- alienthrowaway 5y ago
  I'm speaking for myself only, etc. > Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most - ethically disgusting companies in the world? I'm sorry - I don't work for a "defense" contractor[1]. That said, a lot of societal problems are pinned on FB. IIRC, YouTube moderators also suffer from PTSD, I suspect the same goes for Twitter, and Vimeo[2] - and I believe more should be done - saying this is a FB-specific problem is just dishonest, but convenient. Getting rid of Facebook will not fix the deterioration of social fabric and degraded, that is a convenient lie people tell themselves. Go ahead and look at YouTube comments, misinformation, or Twitter threads, and and ragebait purveyed by - lets see - everyone. Society is fucked and cannot be fixed, at best, it can only be mitigated. This is not to excuse Facebook, but just setting the tone on where we are as a society. The reason it's hard to legislate a fix for this because the required changes are going to affect everyone in ways they don't like, therefore we can't even come to a consensus on what the solution ought be. Getting to your question, FB is a big company, and there are a lot of orgs that do great work that benefits humanity, those don't get as much media attention. That said - I really was "radicalized" on HN: I am a minority, and for years, I've witnessed the cavalier attitude or outright disdain shown by HN towards the more problematic areas of our industry (racism, sexism, etc). What can I say, the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude is infectious[3]. 1. I'm being snarky, but I think writing software to take lives is the most disgusting thing fellow SWE's do. 2. Does Vimeo they even moderate? All the gore/"watch someone die" links I have not visited were exclusively Vimeo 3. It's also the best solution to iterated prisoners dilemma scenario
- philovivero 5y ago
  I knew a Facebook employee a while back, but when there were still enough problems known and public. I asked him about it. He just said they were all lies and BS. He worked there, and never saw any of that. So either he rationalised it away, or, like anything political, half of what you read is blatantly false, and the other half is mostly false.
aught 5y ago
Its not that the work doesn’t need to be done its the compensation for the work not being adequate and the lack of safeguards in place. Doing a hazardous job is one thing but they need to provide appropriate care for those workers as well as compensation equitable for the hazards daily and in aggregate.

https://archive.md/Cw9Ty https://archive.md/Cw9Ty This company has the image of helping lift people out of poverty - I think they are doing good work. The article shows though that if nothing else there is a danger of trying to go with a "we're different and better" corporate image because the truth is often murkier

Etheryte 5y ago
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone projecting that image onto Facebook. Perhaps I simply live in a different context, but this raised both of my eyebrows pretty high.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Seeing as the account that made the post was created moments before the post was made makes it super suspect as well.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    The post starts to with a link trashing both Facebook and Sama. If they're a corporate shill, they're shit at their job.
- throwaway765433 5y ago
  GP probably referring to Sama, not Facebook.

FinNerd 5y ago

They should earn $15/hr. The faster we impose a global minimum wage (or harsh sanctions on violators) the better. Also surprised there aren’t more content moderators. FB (just FB alone for now due to them being a monopoly) should be required, IMHO, to review every piece of content before it is shown in a feed using human review. We don’t let movies get shown before they get reviewed (e.g. PG13).

allisdust 5y ago
And why $15? Should they pay that much in a really poor country. What about a really rich one (may be Switzerland)? End of the day quality of living is totally dependent on local conditions (barring gadgets like ipricy)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
madsmith 5y ago
That is entirely untrue. So many student films, home movies, YouTube posts get shown before human review. You seem to be wildly underestimating the complexity of the task and the long tail of content creation. There are 1.9 billion daily users. You’re asking to REQUIRE a human content moderation system that reviews 100% of the continent that 1.9 billion users can create a day? Before that content can get shown? I don’t see a feasible way of creating a system like that which will serve the needs of those 1.9 billion users in a way that will seem remotely tolerable to them, that can timely share their content.
- falcolas 5y ago
  If a company who already moderates a portion of their content claims that they're unable to moderate content due to scale, should we really accept that as a valid argument? Have we actually decided that "scale" is a good a justification for behaving badly, or are we simply accepting it without critical thought because we once respected those companies? IMO, companies do not have some inherent right to profitability, or even to remain in business, if they can't responsibly conduct their business.
  - blululu 5y ago
    Yes it is a valid argument. This is exactly why Ron Wyden wrote section 230 and why nobody has a replacement that isn’t suspect as a bill of attainder. A light amount moderation is easy. Doing that everywhere is hard. The same thing works for police. We police a portion of the city, but we don’t want or expect the police to cover every single inch of the city.

mmmBacon 5y ago

>>>Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021 Considering the size of the platform ~$130B/year; $5B per year spent on platform safety, while substantial, seems low as a percentage of revenue.

missedthecue 5y ago
It probably doesn't scale linearly with revenue.
blululu 5y ago
That’s much more than I would have expected. ~3.5% is a significant operating expense. Not sure why it should be higher. Most companies don’t spend that much on R&D for example (tech companies are exceptional in this regard).
- neves 5y ago
  It looks like a low value for a content company. The terrible track record of FB in this regard clearly indicates that they aren't investing enough.
- mmmBacon 5y ago
  I’d argue it’s sufficient I if the problem of moderating content was a non-issue. However the article points out the problematic nature of the way content moderation currently works. Given that content moderation is core to their business, I’d expect the percentage spend to be >5%. By comparison they spend about 2x on Oculus.

bArray 5y ago

I'm not sure if this is supposed to cause outrage or not. I know for example companies like Facebook recruit in places like Holland too [1]. I'm also aware that such jobs exist for checking child pornography too. These are not nice jobs, but they do need to be done. The important part is that people in these roles receive phycological support too, which I doubt they get when working for tech companies. I always thought that a better model for moderation would be to distribute the effort. There will be people in my social bubble with similar reactions to the same content and once an algorithm understands these connections, it can distribute the effort of moderation amongst these like-minded people. Another moderation tool would be to simply allow people to trade reputation (which has some value in terms of audience reach) for correctly tagging content. On a different note, if you outsource your censorship, you will undoubtedly end up being censored based on the political ideology of the person doing the censoring. [1] https://jobsfactor.eu/job/49057/dutch-content-moderator/ https://jobsfactor.eu/job/49057/dutch-content-moderator/

vanusa 5y ago
The important part is that people in these roles receive phycological support too, That may be "the important part", but the article is very clear about the fact that, in you know, actual reality -- the workers at this company definitely are not receiving meaningful support.
ashwagary 5y ago
I think African leaders should quickly realize Facebook doesnt need to necessarily operate or be available in their country. Protecting the local population from immoral companies is a priority/duty and some large companies need to be given ultimatums immediately. Importing the sickness of the Western countries is not a requirement for Africa to continue rapid development.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> There will be people in my social bubble with similar reactions to the same content I don't want reactionary right-wingers on Facebook moderating other reactionary right-wingers' content on Facebook.
5y ago

wdb 5y ago

I am wondering if the leadership of Facebook ever was doing this work? Maybe they should do all kind of roles within their company for at least a two days a year. So they get a feel what's going on the work floor

Havoc 5y ago

I really don’t get why there isn’t better automated filtering. There can’t be that many suicide vids etc floating around the internet. Catalog that sht once and use AI similar to YouTube and copyright detection. Sure there will remain a continued need for 2nd line humans but this really shouldn’t be this much of a mental sweatshop operation. Vids especially. Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily produce unique content Also FB being front and center on this issue seems to be a recurring theme…yet they aren’t even the big video destination

notRobot 5y ago
> Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily produce unique content And video is somehow less unique, and easier for AI to categorise and identify? > There can’t be that many suicide vids etc floating around the internet. So very little training material for the AI, then? > they aren’t even the big video destination More than 4 billion video views take place on Facebook every day. [0] I really despise FB. But you're trivializing the problem. [0] https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/ https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/
- Havoc 5y ago
  >And video is somehow less unique This type of video - yes. You and I are both writing unique content right now. Redditors produce thousands of unique posts daily. There are only so many suicide videos on the internet though and the amount a person can produce per day is inherently limited. It follows that fingerprinting said videos should be feasible. >So very little training material for the AI, then? And? Youtube does this with a single example for copyright purposes. Not all algos have to be backprop DL
ChefboyOG 5y ago
I promise, if FB/other companies could automate this away, they 100% would. In general, it's easier for a computer vision system to recognize and filter a video that has already been banned--though, there is a constant arms race here as well--than it is for it to judge the content of a completely new video. That means that, for a huge number of cases, a human being will have to see the footage at least once. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not taking up for FB in this situation. I'm specifically clarifying the difficulty of using ML/DL in moderation systems.

mabbo 5y ago

Here is the crux of the problem, in my mind: Does Facebook have more of a prerogative to help people in Africa or to maximize profits/value for shareholders (primary among them, Zuckerberg)? And the answer is complicated. In an actual free-market system, Facebook would want to reduce costs because it wants to reduce prices to stay ahead of competition. But Facebook doesn't have much competition, or monetary prices. And so Facebook doesn't act like a competitive company, it acts like a monopoly maximizing its exploitation of a resource it controls. If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing its price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs. But it actually does the opposite. Which takes me back to the original question: When Facebook is in this market-power position, is it really it's prerogative just to make as much money as possible?

chottocharaii 5y ago
Regulation is obviously needed
trasz 5y ago
Personally I don't see how the choice between helping people and making money for shareholders could be any simpler.
cosheaf 5y ago
If you take this to its logical conclusion then you're essentially describing the paperclip maximizer from Bostrom's book about the dangers of artificially intelligent systems that destroy humanity at the expense of maximizing their own operation. Contemporary corporations are essentially paperclip maximizers.
strogonoff 5y ago
Yet another dark side of the “free”, or “user is the product”. This could be prevented by changing the law so that it treats any large enough social platform as a communication service provider, requiring it to provide open API with complete feature coverage. This would facilitate native feature-complete third-party cross-platform clients that don’t show any ads, and platforms would have to charge users because no one will be stupid enough not to use a client like that. And once service is no longer free and cross-platform clients exist, the space will finally start resembling an actual free market—honest competitors will stand a chance, and actual end users will be able to vote with their wallet.

pklee 5y ago

Radiolab had a similar post sometime back. That was about philippines - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-no-evil https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...

throw_m239339 5y ago
They were similar articles written about subcontractors and their moderators in Ireland. This isn't just Africa and just Facebook. It's all social media. I guess the only ones that get away with a moderation made by unpaid volunteers at scale is reddit, since it's their entire business model. The real question is, what kind of individual is "moderating" that place...
- toqy 5y ago
  Reddit has to have some kind of moderation other than the volunteer sub moderators, otherwise people could just illegal content in a private subreddit

someluccc 5y ago

This is such a disingenuous article. It’s not about facebook at all. It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work. It critiques working conditions without providing any context as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even average pay- jobs in those countries. Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone.

jjulius 5y ago
>It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work. Can you please cite a source for this claim? While it's true that Sama has partnerships with companies such as, according to the article and to Sama's website[1], Google, Microsoft and Wal-Mart, it's not entirely clear that they're also doing content moderation for all of them. They seem to offer a wide range of services. >Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment. [1]https://www.sama.com/ https://www.sama.com/
- Proven 5y ago
- Kalium 5y ago
  > Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment. Not precisely, but a person's choices should generally be considered in light of the alternatives reasonably available to them. If nothing else, it's often a great way to better understand the choices people make. Not every person has fast, easy, low-risk access to a six-figure USD SWE job with a YCombinator startup.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago

burpee 5y ago

I interviewed a young man who was doing this kind of work for about six months in Ireland a while back for a completely different role. It was quite clearly mentally taxing and he broke down crying mid-interview. I ended up canceling my following meeting and talking through things with him. He was close to suicide, had cut contact with most people in his life and said that he hadn't been able to sleep or think straight since he started the work. Unfortunately I couldn't offer him any work, only a shoulder to cry on and a promise that there was beauty in the world as well. I never thought a job could do so much mental damage to someone, but these jobs are horrible.

jacquesm 5y ago
No, these companies the people that upload/make the stuff are horrible, the jobs are merely a symptom. Any company, large or small, that allows uploads of image content without strict identity verification of the uploader is going to be a vehicle for this junk. I had a super popular website in this space, as soon as I figured out what was going on I shut it down, I am of the opinion that it is not possible to run a service like that in a responsible way without causing damage somewhere.
- forkLding 5y ago
  What if you put in strict identity verification and the uploader is identified but still decided to upload a NSFW or disturbing image?
  - jaredmosley 5y ago
    Then, assuming those kinds of images are against your TOS, then you ban them. This drastically reduces the number of images of that nature that are uploaded not only by ensuring they can't do it again but also by heavily disincentivizing them from doing it in the first place.
    - alistairSH 5y ago
      Beyond that, if the content they post is illegal, there's a more clear path to prosecution than if the content is posted anonymously.

spoonjim 5y ago

Interesting to see that the vendor in question is Sama (formerly Samasource), which started out as a nonprofit but was then turned into a for-profit company (the founder has since passed away). Wonder if this was the catalyst for its corruption.

throwaways85989 5y ago

Thank you fb for advocating for religious extremism throughout the region. This kind of work surely is a great recruiting ground for anti-modern viewpoints and violent anti-western sentiments. https://africacenter.org/publication/islamist-extremism-east-africa/ https://africacenter.org/publication/islamist-extremism-east...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anovikov 5y ago

Well as for salaries, many people in countries that on paper look a lot more developed, make similar money. It's almost typical in provincial Russia.

delegate 5y ago

Genuine question: Who posts this content ? Are there really that many people who do this ? Can't they be banned on first offense ?

bhelkey 5y ago
> Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021. I suspect that Facebook does ban folks but that the people who do it attempt to get around the bans. If this could be solved by banning the people who do this, I imagine Facebook would have done that already and pocketed the 5 Billion dollars.
- packetslave 5y ago
  Remember that guy who live-streamed his killing spree on Facebook a few years back? It got taken down. Hundreds of reposts of the video were automatically blocked before anyone saw them. The small percentage of reposts that DID make it to live? People modifying the video (flipping, cropping, re-encoding, etc) explicitly to get around the machine moderation. Those eventually got taken down by content moderators. There are a lot of shitty people out there doing shitty things to get attention.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Serious question to the people on this site who are employed by Facebook: Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most - ethically disgusting companies in the world? Do you guys just click "hide" on all these articles - on average 1-2 a day - where Facebook has committed yet another absolutely disgusting transgression?

alienthrowaway 5y ago
I'm speaking for myself only, etc. > Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most - ethically disgusting companies in the world? I'm sorry - I don't work for a "defense" contractor[1]. That said, a lot of societal problems are pinned on FB. IIRC, YouTube moderators also suffer from PTSD, I suspect the same goes for Twitter, and Vimeo[2] - and I believe more should be done - saying this is a FB-specific problem is just dishonest, but convenient. Getting rid of Facebook will not fix the deterioration of social fabric and degraded, that is a convenient lie people tell themselves. Go ahead and look at YouTube comments, misinformation, or Twitter threads, and and ragebait purveyed by - lets see - everyone. Society is fucked and cannot be fixed, at best, it can only be mitigated. This is not to excuse Facebook, but just setting the tone on where we are as a society. The reason it's hard to legislate a fix for this because the required changes are going to affect everyone in ways they don't like, therefore we can't even come to a consensus on what the solution ought be. Getting to your question, FB is a big company, and there are a lot of orgs that do great work that benefits humanity, those don't get as much media attention. That said - I really was "radicalized" on HN: I am a minority, and for years, I've witnessed the cavalier attitude or outright disdain shown by HN towards the more problematic areas of our industry (racism, sexism, etc). What can I say, the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude is infectious[3]. 1. I'm being snarky, but I think writing software to take lives is the most disgusting thing fellow SWE's do. 2. Does Vimeo they even moderate? All the gore/"watch someone die" links I have not visited were exclusively Vimeo 3. It's also the best solution to iterated prisoners dilemma scenario
philovivero 5y ago
I knew a Facebook employee a while back, but when there were still enough problems known and public. I asked him about it. He just said they were all lies and BS. He worked there, and never saw any of that. So either he rationalised it away, or, like anything political, half of what you read is blatantly false, and the other half is mostly false.

aught 5y ago

Its not that the work doesn’t need to be done its the compensation for the work not being adequate and the lack of safeguards in place. Doing a hazardous job is one thing but they need to provide appropriate care for those workers as well as compensation equitable for the hazards daily and in aggregate.