The Worst Job In the Digital World 258
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports on one of the worst jobs in the digital world — moderating photos and posts on Facebook and other social networking sites flagged as unsuitable by other users. Last year Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid $1 an hour. 'It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,' says Derkaoui. 'And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.' Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. 'Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc,' says one. 'I left [because] I value my sanity.' Facebook's one-page cheat sheet lays out exactly what must be confirmed and deleted by the team. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities. Emma Barnett adds that although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users' personal details. 'Maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their "friends" – only to find that two minutes later it's being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.'"
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Interesting)
even from this article it's not clear they're just going through private content on a whim.
Well, perhaps this article from 5 years ago will help to clarify the issue for you:
http://gawker.com/315901/facebook-employees-know-what-profiles-you-look-at [gawker.com]
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
If your job is to review an endless stream of too-nasty-for-facebook stuff, and you live in a slightly puritanical jurisdiction, I imagine that you could relatively easily end up handling a fair amount of material that is theoretically illegal, if not necessarily well enforced(and, unlike the higher-ups at facebook HQ, who probably benefit from the 'obviously, we are just screening material in order to hand over anything wicked to the cops' presumption, it might not be easy for Joe Temp to prove that he is just doing his job)...
Re:flag en masse (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not, but this is part of why I left Facebook (as an employee). I've whined about it anonymously here for a couple years.
Even if you have a photo 'private', if it is reported, screeners will have access to it. We had one screener, who was found to be taking USB thumb drives of pictures home from the internet cafe where he worked, all pornographic. There have been cases, nothing major, where pictures leak out to the internet through these means. Nobody was willing to do anything about this gaping security hole.... infuriated me.
I work at Facebook (Score:3, Interesting)
It's surprising the number of devs you hear joking about seeing "JB"... A bunch of 20-something guys with unlimited access to much of the worlds "private" pictures, isn't always a great idea...
Re:Too true (Score:5, Interesting)
It's part of a lingering sentiment in Poland in the last 10 years, ever since we joined the EU. To explain it properly I'll need to focus a bit on how a typical young adult perceives our country.
You see, in the last 30 years we've barely kicked out communism from our doors through the SolidarnoÅÄ (Solidarity) movement. But the leaders of the Party weren't permanently barred from politics in Poland, leading to some discontent. They managed to go back to leadership through democratic vote and have been blamed for "destroying Poland" ever since. While it's true things are very hard here for the average Pole, but most of it can be traced to both tough economic transformation and high rates of corruption. This, in turn, caused a very cynical outlook in people growing up in the transformatory period, with financial success looked upon with suspicion and distrust. Because of these hardships, emigration is often seen as a "rescue" from this and most of our educated have already decided to leave our country. Most of our best healthcare personnel left the country to seek better wages, causing our hospitals to be terribly understaffed and underpayed. This is where the "traitor" thing comes in - people accuse emigrants of "leaving us to our fate", further cementing our economic and political hardships, "diluting our blood" if you will.
I don't agree with this sentiment, but I can see the reasoning standing behind it. What is most often forgotten by those representing this view, however, is that many of those emigrants send money back to Poland to their families, thus allowing them to buy more, in turn strengthening our economy, but such things are unfortunately unaccountable, so there are no ways of determining how much of an impact this has.
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
Conversely, I wonder if people specifically seek out this kind of job for an excuse to access this material. That whole no background check/criminal check thing worries me a little more than the privacy concerns.
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at a Moderation company in Australia processing similar pictures/text to this. This was an issue that came up regularly but which we couldn't get an answer from our legal team.
The general issues are:
-We had to view blatantly illegal material in the line of our job.
-The servers were often in the USA/Europe, so the company technically transported child porn across international borders. (unencrypted no less)
-Even after it's been marked as illegal, action taken, and maybe even sent to the authorities, the original copy is not deleted. It's marked as deleted but still stored in that big old database.
-Police forces around the world want you to keep a copy. If a user posts illegal material, the police want a copy of it. If the police request information about somebody after they bust a child porn ring, saying 'we wipe everything illegal - sorry!' just doesn't cut it.
If authorities combed through their picture database, they'd find tens of thousands of illegal to own that have been transported across borders. IANAL, but it does sound very tricky.
Re:flag en masse (Score:5, Interesting)
This is sometimes called "hellbanning", the user continues seeing content but his/her actions are ineffective (on some forums the user sees his/her own posts but others do not see them, thus giving the user the impression of being ignored by everyone).
I've done this - over third shift, no less (Score:5, Interesting)
This was an unofficial duty that I had while working third shift at a web hosts - Granted, it was more researching complaints of abuse as well as law enforcement requests, but there were many users who had forum software that would get "overrun" with rather graphical posts. The company basically contracted out moderation services to these customers, and passed it off to third shift - We were to patrol these forums, and deal with objectionable content. Now, we didn't get $1 an hour, we DID at least get something that barely beat unemployment, but it still wasn't enough given the effect that the job had.
There were funnier sides to this, though.
We didn't have any great spam controls at the time other than PCRE filters... So one job was going through the hostmaster/postmaster emailboxes, and looking for spam patterns, and creating rules around them. The problem became how to prevent spam without blocking legitimate email that may be mentioning viagra or fisting. Having your female boss walk into a conversation in which you are discussing the fact that someone could legitimately be sending an email with the subject line of "fisting sluts" is always a good time.
Also, they wanted to launch an international video dating website - this was pretty early on, when the tech was new. Pretty standard dating site stuff at the time, except you could record your own video to include with it, with some "cutting-edge" webcam app. These videos had to be approved before they went live. And that job went to? Yep, me. I handled most of the backend server work and some custom PHP code, and this was my reward - Moderation.
This drove home a fundamental difference in how the genders handled dating sites at the time... The womens ads were generally approved, as they were almost always very tasteful- Fully clothed full body views, or simply a talking head, while they talked a bit about themselves, their interests, and what they want in a partner. This was what we encouraged, and was in accordance with guidelines. This part wasn't so bad - You got to hear a lot of fun stories from different cultures at best, and at worst, it would be in a language you didn't understand.
Now, that was the women. The men? Sure, they talked about themselves the same way, and had the same distribution of stories, but the overwhelming majority of the video was unclothed lower torso at best, and feverishly masturbating at worst. This was not a small percentage, it was BY FAR the majority. There's something seriously bizzare about hearing someone talk about loving walks on the beach or whatever, while there's a camera focused on an erection.
So that was third shift - click, penis, reject. click, pantless sweaty guy, reject. click, tasteful ad, approve. click, fat hairy abdomen and rapid motion, reject, and now eye bleach. And so on.
It was that and the spam filtering for the majority of third shift - A good solid 9 hours of offensive imagery, spam headers and penii, which lead to a rather warped view of the world outside of work.
Re:A buck an hour ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's face it, what is really happening is that US'ians are really starting to learn that they aren't WORTH 10 times the amount as citizens from other countries. Regardless of how much money you want for your unsustainable lifestyles you really aren't worth it.