
Trauma Counselors Pressured to Divulge Confidential Info About Facebook Mods - jmsflknr
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/16/facebook-moderators-mental-health-accenture/
======
sciguy77
I saw a heartbreaking YouTube mini-documentary on Facebook moderators.[1] The
American workers seem to get the "lighter" flags like animal abuse, which is
more than enough to cause trauma with daily exposure. I shudder to think what
the offshore moderators go through when dealing with human/child abuse flags.

In my view, Facebook clearly wants this to be a temporary evil, so they can
use the data from human moderators as a training set for automated ML-based
moderation. But I wonder how long people will have to endure this for those
models to reach an acceptable efficacy.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDnjiNCtFk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDnjiNCtFk4)

~~~
munk-a
> In my view, Facebook clearly wants this to be a temporary evil, so they can
> use the data from human moderators as a training set for automated ML-based
> moderation. But I wonder how long people will have to endure this for those
> models to reach an acceptable efficacy.

Alternatively I wonder if it's worth it to put any number of human beings
through this kind of suffering for something as worthless as social
networking.

~~~
jessaustin
You, too, can walk away from Omelas.

~~~
michaelmrose
It's a beautiful story.

[https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf](https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf)
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas By Ursula LeGuin

------
fourthark
_moderators could previously count on 45 minutes every week with a counselor,
or two hours a day for those viewing images of child sexual abuse, with a
minimum quota of one visit per quarter. Today, moderators find themselves
barred from even this scant mental health care unless “their productivity was
high enough for that day,”_

------
viburnum
I kind of think if you need hundreds of people looking at horrible content all
day, then maybe your business is messed up and shouldn’t exist. Humans can
survive without Facebook. It’s not like they’re hospice workers or criminal
investigators. The only goal is to make Facebook shareholders rich.

~~~
AlexandrB
I knew someone who did content moderation for BlackBerry (née RIM) back when
BBM was huge. Any platform that enables communication can be used for illegal
and horrible content. What’s changed is the fidelity. The worst I heard of on
BBM at the time was images such as illicit/child pornography and human
trafficking (via text). The ability to share high res video means the horror
today is more visceral for those that have to watch it.

Having said that, there’s no excuse for how Facebook and their subcontractors
treat the people doing this job. They can easily afford to do better.

------
a3n
If it looks to an outsider like you work for company F, but you actually work
for and are managed by company A, then company F has deemed you not worth the
trouble of direct responsibility. They don't even see you as expendable, they
just don't see you.

------
mschuster91
For what its worth, I believe that the most egregious offenders (think
violence, murder, rape, child porn) should be directly referred to the police
with all data Facebook has on them.

This at least should slow down the torrent of shit that has to be moderated
over the time...

~~~
wincy
I mean in the US pictures of murder aren’t illegal.

~~~
mschuster91
Showing them to children is, at least in Germany, I do hope there are similar
public decency laws in the US.

In any case, people sharing murders who are not journalists or citizens trying
to get attention for an issue (think gang violence or political oppression)
should be investigated for their sanity.

------
wnmurphy
Heard a story a while back on NPR about how Youtube is outsourcing the trauma
of moderating terrible content to the Philippines. It was a glimpse into a
world I had no idea existed.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe that's just a convenient source of desperately poor Catholic workers.

But I wonder, maybe they could recruit people who enjoyed viewing horrible
stuff. At least, if they were self-aware enough to know that the stuff they
liked was horrible.

~~~
netsharc
To further that thought, they can just wire up sensors to these people's
brains, and flash the images for then to see. If the sensors notice arousal:
mark photo as explicit.

In the dystopian future, they're going to not have enough psychopaths for this
kind of work, so they're going to wire up prisoners in lawless parts of the
world and modify the software to detect distress... 20 hours a day, 7 days a
week.

~~~
fiblye
This sounds horrific, but realistic.

We already have prisoners making license plates as slave labor. All it takes
is a couple congressmen in the pockets of a big social network to make it
mandatory for “rehabilitation” to moderate social networks.

------
inflatableDodo
>" _Facebook, Accenture, and WeCare may try to feign ignorance or implement
common liability limiting language in their response. We hope all parties do
not succumb to these common and repeated trends, and instead do what is right
instead of what you are legally allowed to get away with._ "

I admire their optimism.

------
fromthestart
Well here's an interesting thought. Let's say you train a generative network
on illegal imagery. Is the combination of network and weights illegal to
posses? What about images it generates?

~~~
bzbz
Depends on your nation’s gun laws. Is a gun legal? What about shooting
someone?

------
itronitron
Hopefully a small group of licensed psychologists and therapists can set up a
small office across from the FB office in Austin and start serving the
moderators privately.

~~~
staticautomatic
Yeah I'm sure the therapy will be covered by the amazing mental health
benefits these moderators receive through the no-cost health insurance
provided by Accenture. If not, they'll have no trouble at all paying out of
pocket with that cushy $14.50/hr they're making!

~~~
perl4ever
There is something (in the US) askew about mental health coverage. I think
that regulations were passed to try to get mental health conditions treated
more like others, but it seems like there is a shortage of counselors, social
workers, and doctors, much more than other kinds of medical professionals.

I have this feeling that there's something about the incentive structure under
the ACA that is choking off the availability, but I'm not sure what exactly it
is. I'm very curious about the economics of running a mental health practice
these days.

If you can't pay $70-140/hr to talk to a social worker every week or two, they
may well offer you the option of online chat for $150/month. But I feel like
there is a mystery there, because why _should_ it cost that much? And yet, the
people who charge that much seem desperately overworked and barely functional.
Where does the money go? Not to doctors, because everything is done by non-MDs
these days. Not to insurance, because deductibles are in the thousands.

~~~
staticautomatic
The issue is that mental health providers are grouped separately from other
doctors and health care professionals on the insurance side. Different
insurers, accordingly, have dramatically different networks of mental health
professionals which vary in size and quality mostly depending on the
reimbursement rate. Low-paying insurers have worse networks. Some don't even
manage their own mental health benefits. In the bay area, for example, Blue
Shield's benefits are managed by another insurer named Magellan with famously
shitty rates and a correspondingly shitty network of available professionals.

~~~
perl4ever
Perhaps, but specific problems of the bay area or some insurance networks
being insufficient are beside my point. The providers that exist are generally
in-network with the insurance plans I'm aware of in my area, it's just that
they seem to be overtaxed and mostly not taking new patients.

I'm saying, in an area where $50K a year is a decent living, and people take
for granted that an actual MD is not available in most cases, why is $70+/hr
not translating into supply?

It reminds me of my former employer, which was not healthcare, but they were
billing clients something like five times what they paid staff, and yet their
response was never to try to increase the hours billed and hire more people,
but only to squeeze and squeeze costs and shrink through attrition as though
they were losing money.

As a matter of fact, I really should ask someone I know who works for NAMI.

