More Than 140 Kenya Facebook Moderators Diagnosed With Severe PTSD (theguardian.com) 56
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism. The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi. The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.
The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege. The case is shedding light on the human cost of the boom in social media use in recent years that has required more and more moderation, often in some of the poorest parts of the world, to protect users from the worst material that some people post. The lawsuit claims that at least 40 moderators experienced substance misuse, marital breakdowns, and disconnection from their families, while some feared being hunted by terrorist groups they monitored. Despite being paid eight times less than their U.S. counterparts, moderators worked under intense surveillance in harsh, warehouse-like conditions.
The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege. The case is shedding light on the human cost of the boom in social media use in recent years that has required more and more moderation, often in some of the poorest parts of the world, to protect users from the worst material that some people post. The lawsuit claims that at least 40 moderators experienced substance misuse, marital breakdowns, and disconnection from their families, while some feared being hunted by terrorist groups they monitored. Despite being paid eight times less than their U.S. counterparts, moderators worked under intense surveillance in harsh, warehouse-like conditions.
get an union! (Score:1)
get an union!
Re: get an union! (Score:2)
"Get a job loser!"
Gentlemen, behave. Take up boxing if you have too much primitive energy.
Re: get an union! (Score:2)
Re: get an union! (Score:2)
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Simple. He's one of those people who thinks that brutally beating a 70 year old Jew to death [archive.li] while screaming about how you want an October 7th every day is "criticizing Israel" and anyone who says otherwise is an islamophobe.
Re: get an union! (Score:1)
Just the way progressive ideology has always worked. If anything doesn't go your way, scapegoat somebody, then kill the scapegoat. Think Luigi Mangioni -- doctor tells you you're not a candidate for surgery no matter who pays for it, so time to kill somebody who has nothing to do with that decision whatsoever.
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Just the way antidemocratic authoritarian ideology has always worked. If anything doesn't go your way, scapegoat somebody, then kill the scapegoat.
FTFY
Re: get an union! (Score:2)
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*a union.
You gotta love exceptions to exceptions.
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In Kenya? You're more likely to get a bullet.
Re: censuration is a hard job (Score:2)
CTE parallel (Score:2)
Wondering when someone will do a controlled study of regular already moderated social media use to see if a much more mild version of PTSD occurs.
Thinking like CTE, punch-drunk syndrome verses more severe blows to the head.
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This is a known issue (Score:5, Informative)
All social media companies have the same issue. The people trying to keep this stuff off are burnt out and can't cope with the horrid things humans do.
Until humans are gone, this issue will remain.
Re:This is a known issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Until humans are gone, this issue will remain.
Gone from where, though? From the face of the Earth, or just from the moderation facility?
I hope you meant the latter. Maybe use AI instead?
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Hell is other people.
I looked up the quote and it's from a French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
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It very much depends on the moderation policy. If people get banned long before getting to the point of posting this extreme stuff, there are very few who register and account just to post it knowing that a ban isn't far behind.
Facebook tries to allow as much as possible, so has huge amounts of this stuff pushing at the fringes, existing in an environment where very slightly milder stuff is tolerated and the boundary is unclear.
The real news is that ... (Score:2, Insightful)
... there is a greater-than-zero number of moderators who do NOT have PTSD after more than 5 minutes of this toxic waste.
Re: The real news is that ... (Score:2)
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Re: The real news is that ... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's one subgroup of humans extremely well-suited to do this kind of moderation: psychopaths. They understand what causes normal people to break, and can pinpoint it with accuracy, while not being affected by it. Moderating social media posts, if well paid, would be a very easy entry-level job for them, if not a full on career. And they'd become a net positive to the world, their abilities turned for good and recognized as such, rather than the much more usual opposite of that.
Sociopaths might fill that role too, if more moderators were needed than there are psychopaths, but in their case it'd definitely be just entry level, as sociopaths tend to want to move up the ladder quickly and wouldn't stick around for long in what would be, for them, an easy but boring job.
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... there is a greater-than-zero number of moderators who do NOT have PTSD after more than 5 minutes of this toxic waste.
And how are these same moderators after 5 hours/days/weeks/months/years?
It seems to be the prolonged exposure that is causing the problems the moderator farms are seeing.
Mind you, I'm not sure I would want to endure even 5 minutes of the kind of sick shit these moderators must see.
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Some people are detached enough to not being bothered.
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Some people are detached enough to not being bothered.
I think there's a word to describe them ... psychopaths?
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Psychopaths aren't detached, they simply are incapable of empathy. That is not the same thing at all.
Re: "under intense surveillance" (Score:2)
The rational part of our brain is very limited. The subconscious part is dominant 90% of the time. Getting ptsd when there rationally is
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Actual PTSD comes from triggering of prey response for too long. All you need not to trigger it is change the psychological paradigm.
For example a lot of people who went patrolling in Afghanistan got PTSD, while people in their same squad didn't. Difference is that those that got PTSD had prey mentality: "we're going out, and we have to look out for those other people who are hunting us". Do that a lot, and you get PTSD, essentially getting stuck in prey mode.
Those that didn't? They looked at it as "we're g
Re: "under intense surveillance" (Score:2)
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The main cause of PTSD is "it's complicated" mind set. When you think too much in high stress situations, you tend to start thinking about how this affects you.
And that is how you get PTSD. People who don't think too much and instead act tend to not get it. This is one of the reasons why nations where "think about your feelings" therapy is popular, mental illness numbers skyrocket. Because it feeds into neurotic death loops of which we have several. It's also why one of the most successful permanent interve
Re: "under intense surveillance" (Score:2)
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> The main cause of PTSD is "it's complicated" mind set. When you think too much in high stress situations, you tend to start thinking about how this affects you. And that is how you get PTSD.
"The combined data from all three primary factors -- combat exposure, prewar vulnerability, and involvement in harming civilians or prisoners -- revealed that PTSD syndrome onset reached an estimated 97% for veterans high on all three. While severity of combat exposure was the strongest predictor of whether the sold
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The problem with this one is that everyone claims PTSD now. It's how VA health benefits work sadly, because of how the system is set up.
The actual psychiatric studies on PTSD have long since determined the cause. It comes from what is essentially mind getting exposed to prey mode in a way that target cannot control, and that gets "stuck". This is why the symptoms are those of hypervigilance of a prey animal sensing a predator firing up in inappropriate scenarios for that reaction.
You don't get this if you a
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> The problem with this one is that everyone claims PTSD now. It's how VA health benefits work sadly, because of how the system is set up.
Yeah, for sure
> The actual psychiatric studies on PTSD have long since determined the cause. It comes from what is essentially mind getting exposed to prey mode in a way that target cannot control, and that gets "stuck". This is why the symptoms are those of hypervigilance of a prey animal sensing a predator firing up in inappropriate scenarios for that reaction. Yo
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I recall reading several papers on evolutionary psychology and PTSD, as well as clinical and PTSD prevention. At least one of them had a large series of interviews with US soldiers that rotated back from Afghanistan, and some had PTSD while others didn't.
And the correlation that was found (causal links are difficult to establish in this level of multi-factorality of a problem due to how psychology as a soft science operates in the first place) in the mindset. Those that approached things like patrols with h
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Thanks for the try. I wasn't more lucky.
Though I stumbled on this and found it interesting, if not related:
The survivor syndrome: Massive psychic trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder - https://psycnet.apa.org/record... [apa.org]
"Abstract : Describes the "survivor syndrome" as it appears in Vietnam veterans and other groups of survivors of massive trauma and defines it as the persistence into civilian life of traits that were reality adaptations in the traumatic situation. Case examples from the author's inpatient
They get paid?! (Score:1)
"Eight times less than their US counterparts" is still more than I get for moderating /. when those points hit the account. And have you ever scrolled this site with the filter turned down?! /s
Re: They get paid?! (Score:3)
What are the users diagnosed with? (Score:3)
Re: why? (Score:2)
If this is the only job you can get (Score:2)
Where is the AI when you need one? (Score:2)
This job seems perfect for one of the touted Facebook AI's
Re: Where is the AI when you need one? (Score:2)
Is it cheaper than a worker in Kenya?
What TF goes through their heads? (Score:2)
Re: What TF goes through their heads? (Score:2)
Re: What TF goes through their heads? (Score:2)
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Sexual emergency. Most people don't understand that other cultures have completely different paradigms of existence. What is normal to you is perverse and degenerate to them, and vice versa.
US military encountering Bacha Bazi was a good example of this.