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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."
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Facebook Is Forcing Its Moderators To Log Every Second of Their Days

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  • in all the offices.

    I would probably also make sure to carefully document all the mandatory meetings every day.

  • 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.

    • by Anachronous Coward ( 6177134 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:18PM (#59604862)

      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."

      • But what if he needed to do both?
      • by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @09:57PM (#59605204)
        It was actually 0118 999 881 999 119 725 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

        • by spitzig ( 73300 )

          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.

    • Not just this, but the mentality of all developer / software driven operations is that the only people worth anything to the organization are programmers and executives. Support and infrastructure staff are trash and to be under paid and abused.

      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.
    • you had to dial a number to go to the bathroom.

      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

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:12PM (#59604844)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:13PM (#59604848)
    If you joined Facebook in 2016 you really cannot claim you did not know about their ruthlessness, and how they extract every bit of data from their users. Don't act surprised when you find Facebook to not treat you as an employee any different.
    • by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @08:14PM (#59605034) Homepage

      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.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:14PM (#59604852) Journal
    Just kill it. It's nothing but evil.
  • Time and motion study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] to detect lost time.
    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
  • 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.

  • by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @08:11PM (#59605024)
    If you work for the Devil expect to be governed by the Devil.
  • How long until they put tracking tags on employees?
    • When did the first mobile facebook app come out?

      I'd wager they managed to accomplish that about 10 years before your post.

  • by dumuzi ( 1497471 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @08:25PM (#59605052) Journal

    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!

    • 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 dissy ( 172727 ) on Thursday January 09, 2020 @09:05PM (#59605112)

      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.

      • That's weird. I get 15 points like once or twice a week, have for years and years. But one time I made the mistake of trying to mod political threads, assume I got slammed by the metamod "Was this a good post or not?" bullshit they changed it to, then didn't get any mod points for weeks, then only 5 a week for another month.
  • "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)

    by MikeS2k ( 589190 ) <mikes2@nOSPAM.ntlworld.com> on Friday January 10, 2020 @04:22AM (#59605724)

    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.

  • At what point do people just say "fuck it", and start jumping out of windows?
  • No better than the workhouses of the 19th century
  • Facebook.
  • 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

  • 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.

  • Next they'll have something really fascist, like a punch clock.

...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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