Skip to main content

Home/ Duty of care + Standards _ CU/ Group items tagged moderation

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Carsten Ullrich

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...uma-working-conditions-arizona

social media content hate speech filtering facebook monitoring

shared by Carsten Ullrich on 18 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • It’s a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit — or are simply let go.
  • The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”
  • The use of contract labor also has a practical benefit for Facebook: it is radically cheaper. The median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually in salary, bonuses, and stock options. A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona, on the other hand, will earn just $28,800 per year. The arrangement helps Facebook maintain a high profit margin. In its most recent quarter, the company earned $6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue. And while Zuckerberg had warned investors that Facebook’s investment in security would reduce the company’s profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Miguel takes a dim view of the accuracy figure. “Accuracy is only judged by agreement. If me and the auditor both allow the obvious sale of heroin, Cognizant was ‘correct,’ because we both agreed,” he says. “This number is fake.”
  • Even with an ever-changing rulebook, moderators are granted only the slimmest margins of error. The job resembles a high-stakes video game in which you start out with 100 points — a perfect accuracy score — and then scratch and claw to keep as many of those points as you can. Because once you fall below 95, your job is at risk. If a quality assurance manager marks Miguel’s decision wrong, he can appeal the decision. Getting the QA to agree with you is known as “getting the point back.” In the short term, an “error” is whatever a QA says it is, and so moderators have good reason to appeal every time they are marked wrong. (Recently, Cognizant made it even harder to get a point back, by requiring moderators to first get a SME to approve their appeal before it would be forwarded to the QA.)
  • eforeBefore Miguel can take a break, he clicks a browser extension to let Cognizant know he is leaving his desk. (“That’s a standard thing in this type of industry,” Facebook’s Davidson tells me. “To be able to track, so you know where your workforce is.”)
  • Carsten Ullrich on 18 Jul 19
     
    "Pro Unlimited"
Carsten Ullrich

Facebook is stepping in where governments won't on free expression - Wendy H. Wong and ... - 0 views

inforrm.org/...ndy-h-wong-and-nicholas-weller

freedom of speech human rights social media facebook regulation

shared by Carsten Ullrich on 31 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The explicit reference to human rights in its charter acknowledges that companies have a role in protecting and enforcing human rights.
  • This is consistent with efforts by the United Nations and other advocacy efforts to create standards on how businesses should be held accountable for human rights abuses. In light of Facebook’s entanglement in misinformation, scandals and election falsehoods, as well as genocide and incitement of violence, it seems particularly pertinent for the company.
  • To date, we have assigned such decision-making powers to states, many of which are accountable to their citizens. Facebook, on the other hand, is unaccountable to citizens in nations around the world, and a single individual (Mark Zuckerberg) holds majority decision-making power at the company.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In other cases, human moderators have had their decisions overturned. The Oversight Board also upheld Facebook’s decision to remove a dehumanizing ethnic slur against Azerbaijanis in the context of an active conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh disputed region.
  • But Facebook and other social media companies do not have to engage in a transparent, publicly accountable process to make their decisions. However, Facebook claims that in its decision-making, it upholds the human right of freedom of expression. However, freedom of expression does not mean the same thing to everyone
  • rivate organizations are currently the only consistent governors of data and social media.
  • However, the Oversight Board deals with only a small fraction of possible cases.
  • Facebook’s dominance in social media, however, is notable not because it’s a private company. Mass communication has been privatized, at least in the U.S., for a long time. Rather, Facebook’s insertion into the regulation of freedom of expression and its claim to support human rights is notable because these have traditionally been the territory of governments. While far from perfect, democracies provide citizens and other groups influence over the enforcement of human rights.
  • Facebook and other social media companies, however, have no such accountability to the public. Ensuring human rights needs to go beyond volunteerism by private companies. Perhaps with the Australia versus Facebook showdown, governments finally have an impetus to pay attention to the effects of technology companies on fundamental human rights.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page