> Can anyone at Facebook speak to whether engineers are aware of the working conditions of moderators, and agitate to improve their lot?
They are passively aware but mostly don't care. The engineers who express frustration are in the vast minority. Most engineers are just super happy about their own situations, very focused on PSCs, and try to keep to their own stuff. Any internal frustrations are channelled towards appropriate feedback channels where the anger is watered down.
These things would enable them to better deal with the inevitable stress and secondary PTSD that comes with their work. And would help FB perms to observe difficulties and quickly affect change.
Well, they should be elevated above the other departments to handle the obvious security and conflict of interest issues that naturally exist in any company like this. So their salaries should be much higher. And actually, more important than healthcare, which the employee takes advantage of at the employee's own discretion, there should be mandatory mental health counseling and screening. I don't know what the frequency should be, I'm not a clinician. But my layman's guess would be a minimum of 3 times a year for each employee.
But I disagree about siloing them. I mean, I'm sure there are some pretty good security reasons for siloing content moderation off from other parts of the company. Not saying that anyone from FB would necessarily do the following, but imagine an ad sales bonuses start going away because clicks are down. You just can't have ad sales cooperating with content moderation in any way shape or form to get more clickable content through. There should just be a content policy, and content moderation zaps whatever they please. End of story. That's how it should work. If ad sales wants input, they should have to convince legal to change the content policy.
In other words, if this thing were structured correctly, content moderation would be above most everything else. (Everything other than legal.) And completely untouchable via any mechanism other than an official change of the acceptable use and content policies.
Guy Rosen and other execs within Integrity team continually skirt their responsibilities here. They claim they're doing better, but the second-order effects of crappy work conditions and demands keep cropping up. Zuck says one day we will hopefully be able to AI-away this integrity work (especially the most traumatizing), but he does not say a whisper as to improving working conditions or pay while the work needs to be done by humans. And I bet Zuck wouldn't be able to handle the content that these people have to view. Sheryl does not care. She keeps referencing the same standard schpiel about how contracting companies have to abide by a strict set of standards, and how they're ahead of the market in terms of pay and wellbeing. But it's still awful. The divide between contractors and full-time workers at Facebook is truly disgusting.
People who work at Facebook should be pushing for change. But they're numb to the schpiel. They're cushy and looked after and don't want to create a fuss.
Rosen doesn't care. Zuck doesn't care. Sheryl doesn't care. What DO they care about? Perception. Sit in any high-up integrity meeting and you'll see the only thing they seem to talk about is how "x" would be received by users at scale. There's no comment as to the ethics or corporate responsibility. You can be talking about something pretty out there like how human rights intersect with takedown decisions and all you've got is a bunch of people umming-and-ahhing about lossy metrics and how Zuck wants this or that so we better hurry up. Or how awwesome it'll look on our PSCs if we ship this thing.
I agree and in a more enlightened future I hope we can assess companies like this on their net benefit to society and apply penalties when they act in a way that negatively affects society.
AFAIK Content reviewers in the Dublin office work for Facebook as perm employees (are not contractors), and mostly deal with escalated cases from offsite contractors.
Nope, that's not true (unfortunately). Most of the moderators in Dublin (approx 75%) are contractors, but there are a lot more full-time moderators in Dublin, as global moderation (ex US) is run from that office
They are passively aware but mostly don't care. The engineers who express frustration are in the vast minority. Most engineers are just super happy about their own situations, very focused on PSCs, and try to keep to their own stuff. Any internal frustrations are channelled towards appropriate feedback channels where the anger is watered down.