Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
This was a valuable article to read.<p>Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters.<p>Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach.<p>And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook: engineers ($150k&#x2F;year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and content moderators ($30k&#x2F;year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses).<p>I understand the arguments about supply and demand of labour, but I&#x27;d have more respect for Facebook if they demonstrated awareness of this issue. The article talks about moderators re-evaluating the same piece of distressing content that they&#x27;ve already flagged. Why? I suspect because the moderator is cheap, and so Facebook isn&#x27;t putting in the effort to ensure that every judgment needs to be made the minimum number of times.<p>More so than salary, I suspect Facebook considers the moderator cheap in terms of reputation risk. By outsourcing to contractors located offsite from main campus, engineers aren&#x27;t thinking daily about the absolutely horrible stuff moderators are seeing, and so the one group doesn&#x27;t impact Facebook&#x27;s ability to hire engineers. This is a guess - can anyone at Facebook speak to whether engineers are aware of the working conditions of moderators, and agitate to improve their lot?