Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
This was a valuable article to read.Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters.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.And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook: engineers ($150k/year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and content moderators ($30k/year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses).I understand the arguments about supply and demand of labour, but I'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've already flagged. Why? I suspect because the moderator is cheap, and so Facebook isn't putting in the effort to ensure that every judgment needs to be made the minimum number of times.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't thinking daily about the absolutely horrible stuff moderators are seeing, and so the one group doesn't impact Facebook'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?