Book of Nightmare Faces
2019-Feb-26, Tuesday 08:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
You might have seen this article about Facebook's content moderators floating around the internet. The whole thing is a nightmare log of badly-paid contractors, at risk of being fired at any moment for failing to meet arbitrary figures, suffering terrible psychological damage. Facebook passes off its responsibility to another company that churns through workers, using them up and discarding them as soon as they suffer any of the extremely-predictable mental effects of looking at torture, murder, violent pornography, racism, sexism, and conspiracy theories for hours every day. Here's one quote from early in the piece:
Obviously, the proximate blame in this case is on Facebook. They want to be some kind of cyber-public square, connecting everyone in the world with lines of blazing blue light like some early-00s telecom ad, but don't want any of the actual responsibility of maintaining a public square. They pass off cleaning up the trash to someone else and keep welcoming everyone to the square even if some of those people have repeatedly proven that they shouldn't be there. They let advertisers market specifically to people who are interested in "white genocide," for example, and last year Zuckerberg made some extremely convoluted explanation for why they don't kick out Holocaust-deniers. Their moderation policy is an extension of that libertarian abdication of responsibility. Let someone else clean up their messes and that way you don't have to worry about how the moderators are treated. If they only last a year, if they start thinking the world is flat or that the government planned 9/11, if they end up crying and hyperventilating in their car and can't go home without checking all the locks six times, well, that's the contracting company's problem.
But the other thing I think about is that there's no way to fix this. Even if Facebook directly hired on all the moderators and gave them a six-figure Facebook salary and benefits package, the psychological damage of their jobs wouldn't change much. I'm reminded of FBI agents whose job it is to watch child pornography looking for clues in the videos that will help track down the producers. Is there something visible outside the window? Is the wallpaper the same in these videos from separate sources? They have government job security and a government benefits package and they still suffer horrific burnout, mental problems, and suicide rates. Of course they do.
This is exactly the kind of thing that computers would be perfect for handling, except as the article shows, humans fail constantly at handling it because the standards keep changing in a non-systemic way:
It's a problem with the format. I found a Twitter thread about the differences between modern social media and the "old blogosphere," places like Livejournal and Dreamwidth and webrings. It's a good read, pointing out that the OB was more capable of dealing with bad actors because it was easier to manage small islands of content and curate one's own readings:
The thing that really struck me, though, is that the OB is more like physical social networks. Real people are more like those small groups, with some connections between them. I have multiple groups of friends, some of whom know each other and some don't, and in the ones that don't I'm the connection between them. Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter, where anyone can talk with anyone at any time, have no real counterpart in our social history until now, so of course we have no way of dealing with it. Twitter is like if everyone in the world is in a bar simultaneously and they're all somehow in earshot of each other. People reasonably try to import physical-world social norms--don't randomly insult people, don't butt in on conversations you're not a part of--but the platform not only has no expectation that those will be followed, it actively subverts them, and so people spend their time yelling at each other and spreading hate and lies, in far greater numbers than would be possible physically, and the world gets worse.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the robots didn't even need to achieve sapience before they started destroying us.
This is why I still like Dreamwidth a lot, other than tradition. It's a more human-scale website.
For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.It gets worse from there.
The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life.
Obviously, the proximate blame in this case is on Facebook. They want to be some kind of cyber-public square, connecting everyone in the world with lines of blazing blue light like some early-00s telecom ad, but don't want any of the actual responsibility of maintaining a public square. They pass off cleaning up the trash to someone else and keep welcoming everyone to the square even if some of those people have repeatedly proven that they shouldn't be there. They let advertisers market specifically to people who are interested in "white genocide," for example, and last year Zuckerberg made some extremely convoluted explanation for why they don't kick out Holocaust-deniers. Their moderation policy is an extension of that libertarian abdication of responsibility. Let someone else clean up their messes and that way you don't have to worry about how the moderators are treated. If they only last a year, if they start thinking the world is flat or that the government planned 9/11, if they end up crying and hyperventilating in their car and can't go home without checking all the locks six times, well, that's the contracting company's problem.
But the other thing I think about is that there's no way to fix this. Even if Facebook directly hired on all the moderators and gave them a six-figure Facebook salary and benefits package, the psychological damage of their jobs wouldn't change much. I'm reminded of FBI agents whose job it is to watch child pornography looking for clues in the videos that will help track down the producers. Is there something visible outside the window? Is the wallpaper the same in these videos from separate sources? They have government job security and a government benefits package and they still suffer horrific burnout, mental problems, and suicide rates. Of course they do.
This is exactly the kind of thing that computers would be perfect for handling, except as the article shows, humans fail constantly at handling it because the standards keep changing in a non-systemic way:
Like Facebook itself, Workplace has an algorithmic News Feed that displays posts based on engagement. During a breaking news event, such as a mass shooting, managers will often post conflicting information about how to moderate individual pieces of content, which then appear out of chronological order on Workplace. Six current and former employees told me that they had made moderation mistakes based on seeing an outdated post at the top of their feed.No computer is going to be able to handle that in the foreseeable future. Maybe not in my lifetime.
It's a problem with the format. I found a Twitter thread about the differences between modern social media and the "old blogosphere," places like Livejournal and Dreamwidth and webrings. It's a good read, pointing out that the OB was more capable of dealing with bad actors because it was easier to manage small islands of content and curate one's own readings:
In the OB things were a little different: it was a world of a thousand little dictators. A blog was a man's castle, and he could--and did!--deny entry to anyone he pleased.
— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) February 23, 2019
That world was just as capricious as this one--but considerably more fair.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the robots didn't even need to achieve sapience before they started destroying us.
This is why I still like Dreamwidth a lot, other than tradition. It's a more human-scale website.
no subject
Date: 2019-Feb-26, Tuesday 16:24 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-Feb-26, Tuesday 17:59 (UTC)I stay on Facebook on Twitter, but I'm extremely quick on the unfollow/mute button. It makes them a lot more tolerable.