Facebook Is Forcing Its Moderators To Log Every Second of Their Days (vice.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When Valera Zaicev began working in Dublin as one of Facebook's moderators a couple years ago, he knew he'd be looking at some of the most graphic and violent content on the internet. What he didn't know was that Facebook would be counting the seconds of his bathroom breaks. Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors, didn't always keep those employees on such a tight leash. When Zaicev, 33, joined Facebook's moderation army in July 2016, he found a professional workplace where he felt he received in-depth training and excellent treatment. But that all soon changed. As the number of moderators in the Dublin offices exploded -- rising from 120 to over 800 in two years -- the conditions deteriorated and training for moderators all but evaporated.
By 2018, the number of content moderators worldwide continued to grow into the tens of thousands, and Facebook began testing a "time management system" designed to monitor every single minute of their day -- including lunch breaks, training, "wellness breaks" for counseling or yoga, and even the time they spent on the toilet, according to Zaicev and one current contracted employee, who did not want to be identified. In the past few years, Facebook has tried to fight back against criticism over how it deals with horrific content on the platform. The company has spent at least half a billion dollars hiring human moderators, in addition to the algorithms that already police its pages. Increasingly, Facebook moderators say their every move is monitored. When making decisions about content, for example, moderators have to follow an ever-changing document they call "the bible." And each moderator is given a "quality score." "You're allowed four or five mistakes a month -- a 2% failure rate, 98% quality score," said Chris Gray, a former Facebook moderator who worked at the company for 11 months. "So if you come in, and it's Tuesday or Wednesday, and you've got five mistakes, you are fucked for the month, and all you can think about is how to get the point back."
By 2018, the number of content moderators worldwide continued to grow into the tens of thousands, and Facebook began testing a "time management system" designed to monitor every single minute of their day -- including lunch breaks, training, "wellness breaks" for counseling or yoga, and even the time they spent on the toilet, according to Zaicev and one current contracted employee, who did not want to be identified. In the past few years, Facebook has tried to fight back against criticism over how it deals with horrific content on the platform. The company has spent at least half a billion dollars hiring human moderators, in addition to the algorithms that already police its pages. Increasingly, Facebook moderators say their every move is monitored. When making decisions about content, for example, moderators have to follow an ever-changing document they call "the bible." And each moderator is given a "quality score." "You're allowed four or five mistakes a month -- a 2% failure rate, 98% quality score," said Chris Gray, a former Facebook moderator who worked at the company for 11 months. "So if you come in, and it's Tuesday or Wednesday, and you've got five mistakes, you are fucked for the month, and all you can think about is how to get the point back."
Re:Don't like your job??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha, jobs are scarce. Or at least decent jobs local to where you live. Quitting a job just to go work at a McDonald's isn't an improvement (maybe for facebook moderators it might be). Don't let the engineered low unemployment numbers fool you into thinking that great jobs are around every corner just waiting for applicants. And this article wasn't even about the US anyway, it was Ireland.
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You consider being a censor for Facebook a decent job??? I guess you think Knud Wollenberger had a decent job.......and surprise! He lived in Ireland also.
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Let me try again with a bit more rigor: A "decent job" is one paying enough to let someone afford rent, food, and the like.
In other words, some cities have an oversupply of low-skilled or recent-graduate labor so as to drive the prevailing wage for such labor below that which is needed to pay for necessities of life.
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Nope, this is a common problem across administrations. Accentuate the positive and hide the negative.
This is how you end up with jugs filled with urine (Score:2)
in all the offices.
I would probably also make sure to carefully document all the mandatory meetings every day.
Call center jobs (Score:2)
These are basically minimum wage call center style jobs, you go there 1-6 months in search for a better job.
I've been at such job once in my life, you had to dial a number to go to the bathroom. Really fun if you had to take a break with an annoying customer on the line, you couldn't disappoint them or you'd get fired, but your manager was breathing at your neck when you didn't take the legally demanded lunch break. Often you'd end up putting them on hold for 30 minutes.
Re:Call center jobs (Score:5, Funny)
you had to dial a number to go to the bathroom.
I hope they kept it simple and you just had to dial "1" or "2."
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Re: Call center jobs (Score:5, Funny)
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now, that's easy to remember!
0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.
re: encouraging leaving Facebook (Score:3)
Bottom line? Never gonna happen. Not unless something REALLY drastic happens that pisses off a large percentage of users.
It's no different than what regular online sellers have been saying about eBay for over a decade now. It's a huge, evil empire that's ripping off people with the fees it takes on sales, and then was double-dipping when they owned PayPal and made it the only allowed payment method, complete with its own fees. But ... it's still around and thriving.
Once you build a site that fulfills a ne
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I never had any problems with ebay. But, I stopped using it about the time they started doing "buy it now". It seemed to be more about selling new things. But, the used prices increased, too. I think a lot of people started realizing that new/used doesn't matter for a lot of things/for a lot of people.
If the positives stop outweighing the negatives with Facebook, people will stop using it.
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Programmers in turn are only valuable because their contributions are highly scalable. Everything that can't be software and requires a person is an organizational failure to automate and scale profits.
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You had a phone where you could dial out? Why? Calls are delivered to you by the scheduling system ; there are a (very) limited number of options for you to send the call onwards to - which would mostly put them into another queue. So why would your workstation need a dial mechanism on the phone line?
Hot-desking as well? So at the end of your shift you pick up your stuff, unplug your headset, and move aside for the next shift worker to take over your still-war
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
So they treat their employees like their users (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: So they treat their employees like their users (Score:4, Insightful)
Time management systems are hardly unique to facebook, I thought you had to punch out to poop in most call center environments too.
Anywhere there's a few hundred of you doing the same job, I wouldn't be surprised to find a system like this.
If you were the boss, and you've got a thousand people doing this sort of desk bound work, you can use better metrics like cases/calls/hour or whatever, but what about how much time is too much time on smoke breaks? You want to have that talk with several hundred people, that all do the same job, all have the same expectations? You know it's going to be a problem with some amount of them, and others will bitch about it. So something like this that just meters time away from desk kind of keeps things fair for people. I guess you could look at it that way. I'm not advocating it, just thinking what if I was in charge of that many people doing one thing.
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Encourage EVERYONE to leave Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a sidebar: 'social media' is really anything but 'social'. It gives people an excuse to stay apart, and entertain the fantasy that 'the internet brings people together'. It doesn't.
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Why not? Allow me to introduce to this exciting new concept called "mailing lists."
Email deliverability (Score:2)
Email still works.
Only if your message gets delivered to the recipient's inbox. Some smaller mail providers have deliverability problems, and running your own mail server certainly does. This is because of what I've heard described as an "old boys network" that arose in the SMTP business from server reputation systems originally intended to thwart mass unsolicited commercial email campaigns. Also only if your recipient even checks their email, as opposed to having lost interest in email entirely due to having received so muc
Time and motion study? (Score:1)
What would the fear be? That a person is sneaking in free time per day, per week, per month, per year?
Getting paid for shift work and using 15 mins a shift to watch a streaming TV service?
An hour and a half lost in productive work per week? A free hour+ of wage per week to watch TV shows? A full movie at work?
Someone do the average EU "computer" office wage and "math" out per hour lost per week lost to TV time over a years wa
Learn out or burn out (Score:2)
This sounds a lot like the call center job I had in the late 1990s, and "learn out or burn out" was a mantra around there. A lot of techs job-hopped out of there. I was blissfully promoted out. The company that was doing this eventually went chapter 11. That might not happen to FaceBook, but it's a sign of weakness.
Working for the Devil (Score:5, Insightful)
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While Facebook is mainly to blame here, consider what this says about Ireland.
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There is no right or left, there are the rulers and everyone else.
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...make it harder for one side than another to vote.
The reason you have two sides, instead of 6 or 8 or 12 is to make you easier to control, and it has always worked.
Are Republicans worse than Democrats? Of course they are. Do you know what would be better? America having 12 parties in Congress, and gerrymandering being a thing of the past.
You know, like it is in other countries. I live in a country where I will have the choice of about 10 parties at the next election, and 5 of those will make it into our parliament. There are 4 million of us.
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If you had taken basic political science, you would understand (a) why first-past-the-post systems gravitate towards a two-party equilibrium and (b) that there are SERIOUS flaws to alternatives that supposedly promote having more parties.
For instance, if you have a parliamentary system then the "kingmaker" problem where a small, extremist party winds up with outsized control because t
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As long as States control the voting systems, I prefer a form of electoral college (but the numbers need to be rebalanced at least)
Because otherwise a fake vote from a corrupt election offical in Cousinfuck Alabama can cancel out my legitimate vote.
If there were a consistent, accurate nationwide system, then sure.
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Just because the Israelis can't or won't doesn't make it unsolvable.
that there are SERIOUS flaws to alternatives that supposedly promote having more parties.
Like what? Gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Lame duck session power grabs? Electoral college?
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I live in a country where I will have the choice of about 10 parties at the next election, and 5 of those will make it into our parliament. There are 4 million of us.
In America we call that a small state not a country.
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In America we call that a small state not a country.
Exactly my point. A tiny country like mine has several political parties, but 320,000,000 Americans can only manage two?
How did that happen?
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Any chance you could fuck off? It was Republicans who freed the slaves you idiot.
Here's the thing, we both know that happened a long time ago, the parties swapped places and either way it has no bearing on what's happening today. So either you know the republicans are worse and are finding excuses to vote for them anyway or you're so deluded that you think Trump actually has something to do with Abraham Lincoln. Neither's a good look on you, my man.
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There was no "switching places", sorry. It's a lie Democrats push to whitewash their sordid history of racism, but it simply isn't true.
It was the Democrats that were party of slavery.
It was the Democrats that were the party of Jim Crow.
It was the Democrats that tried to stop the Civil Rights Acts.
And those same Democrats in the South continued to get elected to office until the 1990s. It was Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America that finally gave the Congressional seats in the Southern states to Re
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You are the one pushing the lie.
Yes, the Democrats did all those things back then. Scandalous! Until you do some research and find that the Democrats in the 1860s were CONSERVATIVES.
Yes, that's right: Republicans of the 1860s were PROGRESSIVES. Do you really think that a bunch of conservatives from just after the Civil War would champion the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th)?
And you really need to re-do your research on the Southern Democrats.
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The reason we have two sides is because we have territorial voting districts with first past the post elections. The UK also has this, and has had two sides for three hundred years, although who the sides were has varied (of late, the Scottish National Party has started to break this rule by virtue of being strong in one region of the country).
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The strategy is, there is a set of voters that are never going to vote for you, since your policies and actual governing doesn't match their interests. The way to deal with them is to get them not to vote, or to make their vote meaningless. The first category can be accomplished by convincing people that it just doesn't matter, that it is all the same. You can scream about voter fraud, which in reality is pretty rare. You use this "terrible problem" to institute new rules and regulations that make it harder for one side than another to vote. The other way to make votes not matter is clever redistricting such that you either pack all your opponents in a few areas, or if you can you spread them out to they can never get a majority to win anything. The electoral college was basically the first example of this, though perhaps unintentionally.
The strategy I've seen is to try and import voters over the preferences of the actual citizens (think open borders and anchor babies), to have rampant fraud in the form of 3rd party ballot harvesting, and to have counties with more voters registered than people. But keep pushing the lie that asking for ID, just as they would for literally anything of importance from verifying it's my credit card to getting on a plane, is voter suppression. Ballot harvesting is currently largely a Democrat scam but I expec
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Facebook is right-wing? Seriously? Because it embodies all you hate, it must be aligned with the "other" political party?
Any idea what percentage of facebook employees donate to republican politicians?
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Here, look in this mirror to understand why you are so universally despised. Nobody likes a bigot, particularly one whose posts sound like he burns crosses.
How long... (Score:2)
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When did the first mobile facebook app come out?
I'd wager they managed to accomplish that about 10 years before your post.
/. moderator (Score:5, Funny)
They give me just 5 moderator points every couple of weeks, and there are so many posts that need moderating.
It would seem it couldn't possibly get more woeful then that, but then they tell me I should concentrate on promoting...but there are soooooo many that I want to demote, how can I ever decide which ones to spend my precious points on....and just as I find the one post most in need of getting the rare demotion I allow myself to bestow on only the worst of posts... I discover my points have expired!!!
These facebook moderators have it easy in comparison, yet they get all the pity, you bunch of insensitive clods!
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It would seem it couldn't possibly get more woeful then that, but then they tell me I should concentrate on promoting...but there are soooooo many that I want to demote, how can I ever decide which ones to spend my precious points on....and just as I find the one post most in need of getting the rare demotion I allow myself to bestow on only the worst of posts... I discover my points have expired!!!
I would moderate you insightful but my points have expired.
Re:/. moderator (Score:4, Interesting)
by dumuzi ( 1497471 )
They give me just 5 moderator points every couple of weeks
The newest accounts hitting a certain age get all the mod points the most frequent.
Older accounts tend to get more points at once, but less often.
When they disabled anonymous posting there was an insane surge in new accounts, from a handful of 4 million level UIDs to seeing thousands up in the 5-6 million range now.
I'm honestly surprised you even get mod points at an almost 1.5m UID.
I only got mod points every couple months, but haven't had any since the great august anon axing.
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The Numbers (Score:2)
"You're allowed four or five mistakes a month -- a 2% failure rate, 98% quality score," said Chris Gray, a former Facebook moderator who worked at the company for 11 months. "So if you come in, and it's Tuesday or Wednesday, and you've got five mistakes, you are fucked for the month, and all you can think about is how to get the point back."
So if four or five mistakes equals a 2% failure rate, that means the moderators consider around 200 or so stories a month, or just over one an hour, assuming a moderator works 40 hrs/week, 4 weeks/mo.
That really doesn't sound like a horrific workload - how big are these posts?
Par for the course (Score:3, Interesting)
Every Helldesk I've either worked at or heard of operates to these principles; I worked tech support for a large DSL ISP just over 10 years ago; the training was abysmal, showing you basic Windows principles. They would hire any normie off of the streets as the pay was minimum wage.
You had to sign in on your phone, being 1 second or more late resulted in a warning. This phone did all the timekeeping, and calls came automatically through to you - you had to take them and could not cancel. As soon as one call ended, you had 20 seconds of downtime before the next one. You were also expected to write a detailed report on that call into the system.
You had 10 minutes of "personal" time, but to take your 30 minute lunch you had to phone up and ask permission from the front desk. They'd refuse probably 50% of the time depending on call volumes.
I remember my first call; a couple phoned up asking for help changing their router password. I'd never seen the router interface before and fumbled around blindly. There was a 20 minute call length, when I hit 20 minutes I had to tell the couple "sorry, phone back up". This interface was a custom ISP one that was just awful.
The team managers were useless of course; you were told to phone them up for help. If you actually dared to do this they would yell at you for being useless.
This is par for the course for a lot of level 1 helpdesk. If you think this Facebook environment is outrageous or somehow an outlier, it is not. I was just amazed people had put up with 10+ years of working in that horrible environment. I lasted 8 months and had to quit. I now run the IT for a local school, I work 10 weeks less for 10K a year more.
They ended up relocating over 100 miles away, telling the employees they'd have to commute or quit (if you quit, no redundancy). The managers weren't smiling then.
The end is near. Wait for it (Score:2)
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I bet the windows can't be opened.
Modern day slavery (Score:1)
Fuck... (Score:1)
Welcome to the bricks and mortar reality (Score:1)
Timing employee bathroom, meal, or whatever breaks, start time, quit time, product quality, employee productivity has been been the reality in many traditional businesses and industries forever. Thanks to technology, more data has become part of the equation (keystrokes per hour, length and number of phone calls, customers greeted, or whatever) and a logorithm decides if you took too long in the bathroom instead of a watchful animate supervisor.
Does not matter if you work at a help-desk, stock grocery shel
This is basically how every call center is run (Score:2)
They're pretty much running this like a call center. Computers have let us monitor everything. And yes call center workers are monitored down to the minute. They have qualities and expectations that vary depending on the industry that have to be met or disciplinary measures are taken that eventually can lead to your being fired. Missing time can lead to the same. Taking lunch or break time to go to the bathroom,. LOTS of people work under these conditions in the US.
Office worker in "expected to do job" shocker. (Score:1)