Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditions in Ireland

Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:08AM (#25970158)

How do these mods avoid the disturbing material?

The information I've encountered on this topic is a pile of employees and journalists on one side painting a grim picture of life as a FB mod, and this one throwaway account on HN implying it's not so bad. Forgive me if I find that hard to believe.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by ericbarrett on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:31AM (#25970392)

I was an early-ish Facebook employee, and started before they contracted out moderation. I once passed a content moderator in the lunch room, flipping through flagged images, about twenty per second. Presumably she was just reviewing user & automatic flags for accuracy.

What they see is: Penis. Pages and pages of penis. Penis in all shapes and sizes and orientations and conditions. But it was all penis.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by bitL on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:11PM (#25970788)

Porn detection with Deep Learning is 99% solved problem, I bet those moderators only get to view content where the model reports lower confidence, the rest is automatically removed. The same for gore etc.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by ericbarrett on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:26PM (#25970929)

Think how many image posts and messages there are on Facebook and Messenger. Assume your Deep Learning model has 99.9% recall. It will still miss millions per day.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by phreack on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:33PM (#25971572)

That's conceivably manageable if you're Facebook's size with tons and tons of moderators, while improving the data set.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by ericbarrett on Saturday January 30, 2021 @03:00PM (#25972418)

Which is exactly what they do! For better or worse.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by neurostimulant on Saturday January 30, 2021 @07:50PM (#25974610)

20 images per second x 8 hours a day is half million images per day per employee (quoted by gp, though its seem to be unsustainable), and Facebook has an army of content moderators so they probably manage somehow.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by curiousllama on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:13PM (#25970803)

“Oh, look, a hot dog!”

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by vorticalbox on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:15AM (#25970240)

Blind luck or maybe there isn't as much disturbing material on Facebook as one is lead to believe.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by worker767424 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:11PM (#25971361)

Your feed is pretty much posts from friends, groups, things you follow, and ads. If your friends aren't sharing old rotten.com posts and posting dick pics, it's probably pretty good.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by in_cahoots on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:36PM (#25971048)

It’s a numbers game. For every piece of truly disturbing material there are probably thousands of dick pics.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by maccard on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:40AM (#25970484)

The barrier for entry to facebook is quite high compared to many other places on the internet, which probably helps!

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:20AM (#25970289)

That would surprise me greatly. In my online life I've seen stomach-turning troll content everywhere from Duolingo to bitcoin forums. But really, hasn't everyone?

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by herewegoagain2 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:25PM (#25971487)

Not really, no.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:41PM (#25971652)

I actually only added that line as a postscript to not sound like I was making some kind of feeble boast. Ie: 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: racist memes on Etsy, animal carcasses on glassdoor.com...'

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by herewegoagain2 on Sunday January 31, 2021 @05:37PM (#25983314)

And I actually really wonder if other people see such things, because I really don't. Not saying they don't exist, but they don't seem to get pushed into my "timelines". What you could find if you were looking for it I don't know.

I've seen Goatse, though - maybe it's just that everything else pales in comparison.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by mprev on Saturday January 30, 2021 @04:24PM (#25973146)

Duolingo?

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @05:39PM (#25973739)

Duolingo had (or perhaps still has?) language forums. Duolingo used 'move fast and break things' moderation, and as a result there was a constant trickle of posts by racists and perverts.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by benbristow on Saturday January 30, 2021 @11:31AM (#25970394)

Maybe some are more thick-skinned than others. After years of being on the internet and having seen all sorts of stuff I barely bat an eyelid nowadays but if you're not used to it I guess it would be more traumatising.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:13PM (#25970808)

I think it's more a function of age. People in highschool or college can stomach more than older adults.

Younger adults don't shock easily because (a) they typically have less and feel less responsibility, (b) the thrill of breaking the rules tempers natural disgust at seeing edgy material, and (c) they have less life experience to have learned empathy for some kinds of people.

Of course, I might be extrapolating foolishly from my own life. I used to have more stomach for cruelty.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by dariosalvi78 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @03:21PM (#25972594)

I remember well the times my friends used to send each other stuff from rotten. Not that I particularly enjoyed that, but I suppose it was part of becoming more mature? I liked the freedom of back then though, I feel like today's internet has become too politically correct

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by sneak on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:19PM (#25970860)

> natural disgust at seeing edgy material

Disgust is a cultural learning, not a natural response.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by zzzmarcus on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:45PM (#25971126)

That's just... false. Disgust is a response we evolved to keep us from eating things that could kill us.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:00PM (#25971266)

It's probably a mixture, but who knows. Chomsky and Skinner could probably debate it for several lifetimes.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by kodah on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:12PM (#25971372)

It's actually both! Freakonomics did a great segment on the difference and the different types of disgust. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/disgust/

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by uniqueid on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:24PM (#25970914)

Fair enough. The point about aging that I had in mind doesn't change if we redefine 'natural disgust' as 'culturally taught disgust' In general, the older you get, the further you get from mum and dad dictating your behavior, and so the less enjoyable it is to, for example, be rude/crude for its own sake.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by saltyshake on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:19AM (#25969263)

If they WFH, then nothing will prevent them from 'copying' any material they want, even if by cellphone photo of the computer screen, no?

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by throw2838 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:25AM (#25969303)

Well, in office there was very strict no smart phone policy. Privacy laws were big issue when WFH started in march. This company also does phone support for other clients, and handles credit cards. There are huge fines. I am not sure how they made it compliant for FB. Propably sensitive stuff is still handled from office.

But if you have privacy expectation on fb...

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by Twaway45609 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @10:11AM (#25969670)

They certainly hide also your personal information like name, peofike picture, etc... So at the end its just moderating texts or pictures without an author? Maybe they also automatically replace names in text?

I dont think that would hurt anyone then

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by raverbashing on Saturday January 30, 2021 @10:26AM (#25969807)

Well if the content is being reported it is more likely public already or "almost public" (a big group or someone with lots of contacts)

So I think the privacy expectation for that kind of thing is low.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by saltyshake on Saturday January 30, 2021 @10:17AM (#25969723)

Child abuse pictures/videos can still be shared or sold online easily without PII. Other exceptions are celebrities or the difficulty in identifying PII in text.

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by tomp on Saturday January 30, 2021 @10:58AM (#25970057)

Couldn't you just watermark all photos before showing them to workers? Probably wouldn't stand to sophisticated attacks but would guard against theft from "low-skilled" employees...

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Re:Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditio... by throw2838 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @10:33AM (#25969859)

Facebook is the Silkroad 3.0 LOL

Why would anyone use FB for that? It is already very hard to run legal sex related groups on FB. Registration is pain etc..

Some other social networks are full of porn, but even those have zero tolerance for this.

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