The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators

Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by throwaway0a5e on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:24PM (#23919355)

As long as they have a pulse and can sit in the chair long enough to do the job they'll likely be fine. Content moderation farms, call centers and the like tend to optimize their internal processes such that they don't need to restrict their hiring to "professional and healthy people". There are plenty of people who are insane and unhealthy that can hack this sort of work.

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Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by ceejayoz on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:35PM (#23919466)

Do you want "insane and unhealthy" people who voluntarily look at horrifying stuff deciding whether that stuff should be allowed on the platform, though?

It'd be like having a jury pool made up of serial killers.

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Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by throwaway0a5e on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:37PM (#23919489)

>Do you want "insane and unhealthy" people who voluntarily look at horrifying stuff deciding whether that stuff should be allowed on the platform, though?

These kinds of bottom of the barrel places of employment tend to have their policies and procedures tuned to make sure employees do things the way the company wants them done. That's just the nature of doing an unskilled, non-laborious job for a BigCo. There will be automatic spot checks, audits, reviews, etc. It is no different than the cube farm on the next floor where they review images of documents that AI systems have flagged as possibly fraudulent. Such systems are likely in place already for their current moderators.

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Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by ceejayoz on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:50PM (#23919649)

> These kinds of bottom of the barrel places of employment tend to have their policies and procedures tuned to make sure employees do things the way the company wants them done.

Yes, but their hiring pool tends to be "everyone".

Those procedures might not work as well if your hiring pool is explicitly confined to "the people who watch ISIS torture videos for fun". I suspect standard policies and procedures include "fire the people who get off on this stuff".

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Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by MattGaiser on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:39PM (#23919515)

Why not? They don't benefit from it being public. They do benefit from not being fired and presumably there would be audits.

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Re:The trauma of Facebook’s content moderators by Nasrudith on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @04:48PM (#23921402)

This is usually a tempting fate question but what is the worst that could happen?

They have little power to abuse and obvious accountability. If they block kitten and baby pics and allow people being tortured to death they'll get fired quickly after the inevitable shitstorm.

Insane and unhealthy or creepy doesn't neccessarily mean dangerous. Even if they got twisted pleasure from it they would be gross but not inflicting actual harm. It isn't like people are being brutally murdered to give them kicks - they aren't a source of demand.

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