Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by commandlinefan on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @10:39AM (#20223770)

> Make the users do a little every so often.

Oh, dear god, no - have you ever used Reddit? This is what happens when you outsource moderation to the sorts of users who enjoy moderating other people.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by nvrspyx on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @10:51AM (#20223881)

Have you ever used Facebook? It’s much worse and this is specifically in reference to media that are against Facebook’s guidelines (e.g. nudity, gore, etc), not all content as a whole. Users doing some moderating in this context would simply be presenting flagged media randomly to users and asking if it breaks the guidelines.

Very completely different things. Subreddits would be the equivalent of Facebook Pages and they already have moderation tools for those that run the page.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by saagarjha on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @12:33PM (#20224790)

Reddit is a bit different than what was suggested here, since moderators are not a rotating position there and this encourages power trips.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by baroffoos on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:22PM (#20229559)

Stack overflow has the users do the moderation and it works well, maybe not perfect but its not bad.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by acdha on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:17AM (#20224101)

There's not really a shortcut around having employees do it because Facebook has a significant amount of private content which users will not tolerate being shared, standards vary widely (imagine a vegan flagging every picture with leather visible or a post about eating meat as obscene — if you're requiring this, do you just disable their account once you notice it?), and especially because it's the target of coordinated group activity so errors won't be uncorrelated: get a cycle of outrage politics going and you'll have thousands of people around the world who have no easily-observed connection to each other flagging things as either objectionable or safe.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by Fjolsvith on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:48AM (#20224390)

And yet Facebook lawyers recently argued to a judge that there is no expectation of privacy on Facebook.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by acdha on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @12:58PM (#20224998)

I’m not defending them but there is a distinction between Facebook using your private data for mining and displaying it to random strangers. Any sort of user-driven moderation policy would need to have a way to handle that or people would stop using the service.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by Fjolsvith on Thursday June 20, 2019 @12:49AM (#20229973)

Isn't everything you post on FB available for anyone to browse?

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by saagarjha on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @01:09PM (#20225106)

You could have a system where multiple people flagging certain content would be a signal to give it manual review.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by otakucode on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @05:51PM (#20227741)

I've always expected that a system which could work, albeit with flaws, would be to ratchet up censorship for any individual user who flags content. The more they flag, the less they see. The only 'problem' is that this would leave users fearing that there are others who have not flagged the same content objectionable that they have, and are viewing that content without being actively prevented. They'd be protected themselves, but it would be easy to convince them (if any convincing is even necessary) that 'almost everyone else' is consuming the raw obscene feed and being turned into monsters by it.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by jandrese on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @04:31PM (#20227023)

This already exists on Facebook.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by jandrese on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:39AM (#20224293)

Just what I want my grandmother to see when she logs into Facebook once a week to check on the grandkids.

------------------------------------------------------------

Hello user, you have been randomly selected to help moderate.

Does this depict pedophilia? Y/N

[ Image here ]

This image was flagged by other users as depicting horrible gore and death, do you agree Y/N?

[ Image here ]

This post may contain hate speech, do you agree? Y/N

[ Embedded Nazi Screed post ]

Thank you for making Facebook a safer place for everybody!

------------------------------------------------------------

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by calgoo on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @12:18PM (#20224642)

Make it captcha test: Select all the pictures of animal cruelty. /s

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by megous on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @04:35PM (#20227066)

Wow, captcha from hell.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by ceejayoz on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:22AM (#20224142)

> Make the users do a little every so often.

"Facebook made me look at child porn" is probably a headline Facebook would prefer not to have going around.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by arethuza on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @09:54AM (#20223346)

Personally, I wouldn't go that far - just that I would think anyone doing this kind of job would need a lot of training, active support and monitoring and probably periodic breaks to do something else and decompress. Probably long term health care coverage as well.

Would that be expensive at the scale required by Facebook? Very.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by jklinger410 on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @09:55AM (#20223362)

Only if they dole out libra-bux

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by worble on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @10:26AM (#20223630)

>libra-bux

Personally I'm fond of zucc-bux

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by asark on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @10:59AM (#20223956)

Seen on here the other day (can't remember the poster to credit them): "Douche Mark". A play on Deutsche Mark, for those who are either not European or not old enough to remember that currency, as seemed to be the case with some respondents to the original post.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by fencepost on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @10:53AM (#20223892)

Slashdot's "hey, go moderate some posts" thing but forced to before they can use the platform anymore. That'd be fun.

Overall not possible. On Slashdot everything is basically public, on Facebook it's largely private/restricted and I'm sure from past discussions that the worst stuff is in private groups or clusters of friends. They could do much more aggressive banning of users (and detecting new accounts designed to circumvent bans) for sharing such content or being in groups focused around such content, but that might hurt their most important metrics.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by TallGuyShort on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:46AM (#20224358)

I agree with your point about the site being a bad idea, so maybe your first point was tongue-in-cheek. But displaying reported child pornography to people outside of your controlled environment? Not a great idea...

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by asark on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @01:56PM (#20225481)

Just pricing in an externality. If that's a disgusting and shocking way to deal with this, then it doesn't follow to me that paying a little money to folks to do it makes it anywhere near OK.

So yeah, it was tongue in cheek, with a side of reductio.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by TallGuyShort on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @02:53PM (#20226139)

No the concern with distributing likely child pornography and snuff films to users is that the whole point of moderation is to STOP distributing that. You want to have it moderated in as controlled an environment as possible. I'm all for not subjecting more people to it than necessary, but it should at least be people who explicitly consent and are trained and provided with the necessary resources.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by asark on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @03:12PM (#20226375)

Don't have to subject anyone to it. Don't have Facebook.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by TallGuyShort on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @03:41PM (#20226616)

I have never distributed child pornography or snuff films. I'm already not subjecting anyone to it. Communications channels exist. Unless you want to undo that, or enable this behavior, you have to deal with it somehow.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by asark on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @05:12PM (#20227384)

We don't have to have huge, centralized communication sites where anyone can sign up and post stuff and the operator's shielded from liability for what's posted so long as they subject a bunch of humans to it in order to filter it out, even if there's tons and tons of it posted constantly. We only have to have that in order to keep supporting the current ad-tech business models, which isn't a given.

I'm not saying if Sally starts a forum and it gets hacked and someone posts illegal stuff she should be fined or charged with anything. I'm not saying she should even be in trouble if she gives one person who turns out to be a jerkass posting rights and that person posts illegal stuff. But if she opens up public signups, gets a billion or two users, then says "well I guess I'll just have to pay a bunch of people money to look at all this gore porn that's getting posted" the rest of us should go "uh, no, you should instead just stop".

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by TallGuyShort on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:55AM (#20232939)

That's a very arbitrary line that's really just based on you making a judgment call for things you like or against things you don't like. You'd probably do well in American politics.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by asark on Thursday June 20, 2019 @10:06AM (#20233057)

I don't like subjecting a bunch of people to horrible images on an industrial scale, no. And I don't think "it's making us money and we can't think of a better way" is an excuse to keep it up.

[EDIT] and given that second sentence, no, I'd get nowhere in American politics.

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Re:Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions by TallGuyShort on Thursday June 20, 2019 @01:08PM (#20234916)

So your solution here is that instead of all these people voluntarily seeking other jobs, their department shouldn't have a reason to exist, ergo shutdown Facebook and now all these people and more are involuntarily unemployed. Riight.

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