Facebook Moderators Say Company Is Asking Them To 'Risk Our Lives' (engadget.com) 67
In an open letter published Wednesday, a group of Facebook moderators say the company is putting them and their families at risk by asking them to go back to work in the midst of the pandemic. Engadget reports: The content reviewers say that while workers with a doctor's note can be excused from going to the office, those with high risk family members don't get the same opportunity. "In several offices, multiple COVID cases have occurred on the floor," the letter, states. "Workers have asked Facebook leadership, and the leadership of your outsourcing firms like Accenture and CPL, to take urgent steps to protect us and value our work. You refused. We are publishing this letter because we are left with no choice."
According to the letter-writers, the reason Facebook is pushing moderators to go back to the office is because the company's AI-based moderation is "years away" from being truly effective: "Without informing the public, Facebook undertook a massive live experiment in heavily automated content moderation. Management told moderators that we should no longer see certain varieties of toxic content coming up in the review tool from which we work -- such as graphic violence or child abuse, for example. The AI wasn't up to the job. Important speech got swept into the maw of the Facebook filter -- and risky content, like self-harm, stayed up. The lesson is clear. Facebook's algorithms are years away from achieving the necessary level of sophistication to moderate content automatically."
The letter also brings up several issues that predate the coronavirus pandemic, like the lack of mental healthcare for moderators as well as their status as contractors rather than full-time employees. Among the moderators demand from Facebook and the contracted companies that employ them: hazard pay, more flexibility to work from home and access to better mental healthcare. "We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do and we prioritize their health and safety," a Facebook spokesperson said. "While we believe in having an open internal dialogue, these discussions need to be honest. The majority of these 15,000 global content reviewers have been working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of the pandemic. All of them have access to health care and confidential wellbeing resources from their first day of employment, and Facebook has exceeded health guidance on keeping facilities safe for any in-office work."
According to the letter-writers, the reason Facebook is pushing moderators to go back to the office is because the company's AI-based moderation is "years away" from being truly effective: "Without informing the public, Facebook undertook a massive live experiment in heavily automated content moderation. Management told moderators that we should no longer see certain varieties of toxic content coming up in the review tool from which we work -- such as graphic violence or child abuse, for example. The AI wasn't up to the job. Important speech got swept into the maw of the Facebook filter -- and risky content, like self-harm, stayed up. The lesson is clear. Facebook's algorithms are years away from achieving the necessary level of sophistication to moderate content automatically."
The letter also brings up several issues that predate the coronavirus pandemic, like the lack of mental healthcare for moderators as well as their status as contractors rather than full-time employees. Among the moderators demand from Facebook and the contracted companies that employ them: hazard pay, more flexibility to work from home and access to better mental healthcare. "We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do and we prioritize their health and safety," a Facebook spokesperson said. "While we believe in having an open internal dialogue, these discussions need to be honest. The majority of these 15,000 global content reviewers have been working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of the pandemic. All of them have access to health care and confidential wellbeing resources from their first day of employment, and Facebook has exceeded health guidance on keeping facilities safe for any in-office work."
That's just stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment is both thoughtless and mean spirited. You should reflect on what you said and why it was wrong to say it.
Re: That's just stupid (Score:1)
My guess is they're low paid (Score:2)
At any rate low pay, high stress job (you're moderating some of the worst shit on the Internet) means you've got employees who need somebody there to crack the whip if you want all the money you can wring out of them (in terms of moderation).
Re: My guess is they're low paid (Score:1, Insightful)
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Welcome to the world of corporate "decision making". They often seem to make decisions by throwing dice, on the principle that any decision is better than no decision.
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Welcome to the world of corporate "decision making". They often seem to make decisions by throwing dice, on the principle that any decision is better than no decision.
This is probably not too far from the truth. In management classes, they deride "paralysis by analysis" and make sure that students know that when there is no good choice, flipping a coin is better than seeking a better third option at some future date.
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Welcome to the world of corporate "decision making". They often seem to make decisions by throwing dice, on the principle that any decision is better than no decision.
This is probably not too far from the truth. In management classes, they deride "paralysis by analysis" and make sure that students know that when there is no good choice, flipping a coin is better than seeking a better third option at some future date.
Sure. But doing that requires being able to determine competently whether there is a good choice or not. Apparently they do not teach that part.
Re:Excuses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Moderation without leaving written or recorded messages of your policies can be considerably trickier. "My supervisor says to cancel all MAGA posters" is much harder to prove for the employees in an office than when someone else in a household hears the converstion. For example, that Facebook uses secret rules is well established.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/e... [forbes.com]
That Facebook has published its real secret rules seems unlikely in the extreme.
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Isn't that what Facebook Messenger/email is for? Isn't that what written policy documents are for? A written record of what the policy is?
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Isn't that what Facebook Messenger...
Are you joking? They value their privacy.
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People making excuses for slavery is pathetic.
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TPB tell us that this disease is serious enough to shut down the restaurants and all "non-essential" workers, yet FB moderators are apparently important enough that their lives should be risked so that someone doesn't post wrongthink on FB.
Kind of puts the worth of a person's life in perspective - yes, it's important to protect Grandma, but not important enough to risk corporate profit.
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Honestly this is all just people making excuses to work from home. These people want to stay home but insist that someother worker gets her butt to work and stock the shelves at Walmart.
Well at least we know you didn't even RTFA in Analogy 101 class.
Fucking. Hell.
Re: Excuses (Score:3)
If you actually read the complaint you'd see multiple cases of Covid outbreaks at Facebook offices. This is a regularly fatal disease and unlike the Walmart employee there's nothing about the job that requires them to actually be in the office
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What the fuck is a Totprog.
I would like a good chuckle too.
time to break my keto (Score:1)
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I totally believe it after reading these [theverge.com] articles [theverge.com]. I guess they found another contracting company to put the same kinds of people through the next episode of this horror series. Now on HBO Max!
Only The Strong Survive (Score:2)
Will be some good breeding stock from this.
Re: Only The Strong Survive (Score:2)
Yo, killing off old people does shit to your fantasy eugenics. Hell half the reason our health goes to shit post breeding age is natural selection is incapable of selecting against it with no mechanism to pass down the "good" ageing gene
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It is called a joke. If you can't understand that then pound some sand. :)
Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I would guess that the working from office is based around the access to illegal materials and having a safe harbour clause with law enforcement.
For example, if you're at work, and you're provably at a work computer that only accesses Facebook, and links from there, then any an all content on the computer becomes evidence for pointing a legal finger at people who post illegal content (from criminal behaviour through to snuff and kiddie porn).
If said computer becomes riddled with illegal imagery, then there is a very good trail that guarantees nothing came in from outside that room, and nothing leaves that device.
Once you start taking that home, then you lose the ability to secure a terminal in that fashion. If the telecommute home computer becomes infested, or a work laptop using the home wireless becomes compromised, then there is very little recourse should that device become host to material that couldn't be proven to have come from a FB connection, opening the employee up to all kinds of charges.
And there's almost certainly no way to police the distribution of any content that is uncovered in the course of the job. Working in a secured environment is just that.. And it's there to protect the worker as much as anything.. Other companies working round security issues, I suspect don't have the legal requirements for accessing illegal content that FB does with its mods.
Those are just the hurdles I can immediately think of.. Without knowing the exact legal agreements with law enforcement, none of us really know the true picture.
As for going in? I work direct support to front line in a hospital, so I've been on site nearly every day since the start of the pandemic, and seen colleagues get sick from it.. I appreciate how hard it is, but like everyone else I work with and around, we know we've got a job to do, and to make sure there are jobs afterwards, we have to keep the wheels on (actually, in my case, I have a job to do, so patients have a good shot at having life afterwards, but hey.. That's the reason I joined healthcare).
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I suspect the problem isn't so much illegal content (it's relatively easy to provide a locked down appliance incapable of locally storing anything), but preventing exfiltration of sensitive/protected information.
That's most likely not how they access their tools (Score:3)
Finally companies do like to have the flexibility to do WFH if they find the hit in productivity from not having a manager standing over them is less than the cost of having a physical
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I work for a tech company right now, and for the moment, we have embraced working from home. Overall, I like it quite a bit (the commute is awesome), but there are definitely advantages to us all being in one place at once, and I have regrettably noticed that working from home is having a less than ideal affect on my overall productivity. Speaking for myself, there are more distractions at home than at work, so I am having to work longer hours to compensate. Some are simply unable to find enough isola
Wait. Wait wait wait. (Score:3)
Am I missing something? Why can't the content reviewers VPN from home?
Like the rest of us are doing?
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That way they can breathe (SARS-COV-2) down their necks.
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Ah, yes, good old dysfunctional "managers" that cannot actually supervise anybody but needs people present to give themselves the illusion of being able to.
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Their management wants to be able to oversee them in person, likely so they can squeeze a little more productivity out of them.
Hm. Good point. One might say, if a manager must have their direct reports physically present, what exactly is the manager's job again?
The problem here is pay (Score:3)
Mix in some very, very high turnover (you're reading posts about guys wan
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I wasn't aware that this was a call center environment. You raise a very good point. Call centers are a nasty environment.
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Also so the management can say they are taking steps to prevent PTSD. It's a big problem for social media moderators, particularly on Facebook which seems to get the worst of it.
If they are in the office the managers can say they put up motivational posters and there is a therapist they can go talk to on their lunch break. That way if they get PTSD it's their fault!
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How hard is it to put metrics in saying they have to moderate x items/day? This seems like a super easy job to manage remotely.
Facebook doesn't like people working from home (Score:1)
Facebook doesn't like people working from home.
I've been recruited to them multiple times, but they insist on my relocation to areas where their offices are located. They recently baited me with "work from home" job opportunities, but that's only during COVID-19 and I would have been required to relocate in April, 2021, anyway.
Facebook is crazy stupid to work for.
Facebook Wants Money, Shuns Responsibility (Score:2)
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Facebook and Twitter are all but guaranteed to initiate our next war.
Fixed that for you. Seriously, they are doing their dead-level best to both appear to take content management seriously while doing as little of it as possible, what with it mostly just interfering with their whole 'passive yellow journalism' business model. "Remember the Maine!" takes on a whole new gravity in a world with nuclear weapons and drones equipped with precision missiles.
Nothing ever works 100% (Score:2)
The argument of using one false negative and one false positive is as proof that the AI doesn't work or is not up to the task is meaningless. The real question is what percentage of moderated content is incorrectly classified - that would tell you whether or not AI is up to the job. Unfortunately this information is missing from this letter. If the bar is 100% correct 100% of the time, AI will never be up to the job, and neither will any of the human moderators. If AI is close to human error rate, it provid
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Given that a high degree of things that get moderated on are subjective, then I suspect that there's not ever going to be a suitably objective metric to measure by.
This would also probably mean that any AI that deviated from the bias of the person/group implementing it would be marked unfit, even if it had correctly learned a completely objective and measurable metric from the data.
Yup that's it (Score:2)
For a bunch of anal retentive (Score:2)
Facebook Moderators Say Company Is Asking Them To 'Risk Our Lives'
Why not wear a mask? (Score:1)
Hey, have you heard the good news about masks? They work! That's what the press says, at least.
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What they say is that wearing masks [correctly] works for reducing viral load, and thus risk. They don't say that masks are 100% effective at stopping Covid-19. Only trolls and dumbasses claim that they're saying that, and only the latter believe it.
Facebook can't figure out how to... (Score:3)
Moderate content remotely? That's hilarious. And sad, but mostly hilarious.
Remote Desktop? (Score:2)
Have these people not heard of remote desktop? You can do this with Windows, granted it's probably a bit expensive but I'm sure you can do BYOL model and leverage AWS Workspaces with DUO 2-factor sign-in. Issue out dumb chrome books and you're good to go. Pretty much can work from anywhere...
It's silly... (Score:2)
Why can't the work be done from home?
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Probably because Facebook is trying to hide both the kind of content being posted to their platform, and the kind of censorship* of content they are engaging in.
* Of course it's censorship, it's just not illegal censorship. It isn't only censorship when the government does it, it's censorship when someone in charge does it to someone else.
Aww, too bad. (Score:1)
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1984 (Score:1)