[HN Gopher] Facebook's African Sweatshop
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook's African Sweatshop
Author : throwaway765433
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-02-14 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (time.com)
| anovikov wrote:
| Well as for salaries, many people in countries that on paper look
| a lot more developed, make similar money. It's almost typical in
| provincial Russia.
| FinNerd wrote:
| They should earn $15/hr. The faster we impose a global minimum
| wage (or harsh sanctions on violators) the better.
|
| Also surprised there aren't more content moderators. FB (just FB
| alone for now due to them being a monopoly) should be required,
| IMHO, to review every piece of content before it is shown in a
| feed using human review. We don't let movies get shown before
| they get reviewed (e.g. PG13).
| kcb wrote:
| MPAA ratings are voluntary not law.
| allisdust wrote:
| And why $15?
|
| Should they pay that much in a really poor country. What about
| a really rich one (may be Switzerland)?
|
| End of the day quality of living is totally dependent on local
| conditions (barring gadgets like ipricy)
| [deleted]
| madsmith wrote:
| That is entirely untrue. So many student films, home movies,
| YouTube posts get shown before human review.
|
| You seem to be wildly underestimating the complexity of the
| task and the long tail of content creation. There are 1.9
| billion daily users.
|
| You're asking to REQUIRE a human content moderation system that
| reviews 100% of the continent that 1.9 billion users can create
| a day? Before that content can get shown? I don't see a
| feasible way of creating a system like that which will serve
| the needs of those 1.9 billion users in a way that will seem
| remotely tolerable to them, that can timely share their
| content.
| falcolas wrote:
| If a company who already moderates a portion of their content
| claims that they're unable to moderate content due to scale,
| should we really accept that as a valid argument?
|
| Have we actually decided that "scale" is a good a
| justification for behaving badly, or are we simply accepting
| it without critical thought because we once respected those
| companies?
|
| IMO, companies do not have some inherent right to
| profitability, or even to remain in business, if they can't
| responsibly conduct their business.
| blululu wrote:
| Yes it is a valid argument. This is exactly why Ron Wyden
| wrote section 230 and why nobody has a replacement that
| isn't suspect as a bill of attainder. A light amount
| moderation is easy. Doing that everywhere is hard. The same
| thing works for police. We police a portion of the city,
| but we don't want or expect the police to cover every
| single inch of the city.
| poiujyhh wrote:
| https://archive.md/Cw9Ty
|
| This company has the image of helping lift people out of poverty
| - I think they are doing good work. The article shows though that
| if nothing else there is a danger of trying to go with a "we're
| different and better" corporate image because the truth is often
| murkier
| Etheryte wrote:
| I don't think I've ever heard of anyone projecting that image
| onto Facebook. Perhaps I simply live in a different context,
| but this raised both of my eyebrows pretty high.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Seeing as the account that made the post was created moments
| before the post was made makes it super suspect as well.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The post starts to with a link trashing both Facebook and
| Sama. If they're a corporate shill, they're shit at their
| job.
| throwaway765433 wrote:
| GP probably referring to Sama, not Facebook.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Serious question to the people on this site who are employed by
| Facebook:
|
| Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most -
| ethically disgusting companies in the world?
|
| Do you guys just click "hide" on all these articles - on average
| 1-2 a day - where Facebook has committed yet another absolutely
| disgusting transgression?
| philovivero wrote:
| I knew a Facebook employee a while back, but when there were
| still enough problems known and public. I asked him about it.
| He just said they were all lies and BS. He worked there, and
| never saw any of that.
|
| So either he rationalised it away, or, like anything political,
| half of what you read is blatantly false, and the other half is
| mostly false.
| manquer wrote:
| 1. You drink the cool aid, the perspective is different, you
| will think it is hit piece and the people are out to get your
| company and discard valid journalism along with the junk . [1]
|
| 2. If you job depends on your not understanding something, most
| people won't understand even if it is common sense. The
| economic incentives don't align
|
| 3. It is easy to blame the institution vaguely like all the
| people who didn't directly kill/torture anyone in Nazi Germany
| nevertheless enabled the oppressive government to function. [2]
|
| ---
|
| [1] More extreme forms we see today all the time with vaccine
| and other science denialism enabled/ fueled by platforms like
| Facebook
|
| [2] Comparison with Nazis is not to equate with Facebook and
| offend anyone, it is to illustrate that even in the extreme
| case like that unless you are directly involved easy to ignore
| and support/enable atrocities at that level let alone what
| companies like Facebook / Google do
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm not trying to relativize here - just wondering, doesn't
| this hit a lot of people? Several megacorps have a bad image -
| at least Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. And whole industries get
| bad reputation - military, intelligence, meat, oil & gas,
| surveillance, the list goes on. In some circles even
| proprietary software is an evil thing. (I like FOSS but I can't
| go around hating every software company.)
|
| Lots of people decide that they just want to make a living and
| can't always find a job that is ponies and rainbows, I think.
| I've myself thought about working for a local surveillance-
| related company but it disgusted me a bit and I was in a
| fortunate position to be able to find something else.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| Thank you fb for advocating for religious extremism throughout
| the region. This kind of work surely is a great recruiting ground
| for anti-modern viewpoints and violent anti-western sentiments.
|
| https://africacenter.org/publication/islamist-extremism-east...
| Havoc wrote:
| I really don't get why there isn't better automated filtering.
|
| There can't be that many suicide vids etc floating around the
| internet. Catalog that sht once and use AI similar to YouTube and
| copyright detection.
|
| Sure there will remain a continued need for 2nd line humans but
| this really shouldn't be this much of a mental sweatshop
| operation.
|
| Vids especially.
|
| Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily produce
| unique content
|
| Also FB being front and center on this issue seems to be a
| recurring theme...yet they aren't even the big video destination
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| I promise, if FB/other companies could automate this away, they
| 100% would.
|
| In general, it's easier for a computer vision system to
| recognize and filter a video that has already been banned--
| though, there is a constant arms race here as well--than it is
| for it to judge the content of a completely new video. That
| means that, for a huge number of cases, a human being will have
| to see the footage at least once.
|
| EDIT: To be clear, I'm not taking up for FB in this situation.
| I'm specifically clarifying the difficulty of using ML/DL in
| moderation systems.
| notRobot wrote:
| > Written text is a bit harder because anyone can easily
| produce unique content
|
| And video is somehow _less unique_ , and _easier_ for AI to
| categorise and identify?
|
| > There can't be that many suicide vids etc floating around the
| internet.
|
| So very little training material for the AI, then?
|
| > they aren't even the big video destination
|
| More than 4 billion video views take place on Facebook every
| day. [0]
|
| I really despise FB. But you're trivializing the problem.
|
| [0] https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/
| [deleted]
| burpee wrote:
| I interviewed a young man who was doing this kind of work for
| about six months in Ireland a while back for a completely
| different role. It was quite clearly mentally taxing and he broke
| down crying mid-interview.
|
| I ended up canceling my following meeting and talking through
| things with him.
|
| He was close to suicide, had cut contact with most people in his
| life and said that he hadn't been able to sleep or think straight
| since he started the work. Unfortunately I couldn't offer him any
| work, only a shoulder to cry on and a promise that there was
| beauty in the world as well.
|
| I never thought a job could do so much mental damage to someone,
| but these jobs are horrible.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, these companies the people that upload/make the stuff are
| horrible, the jobs are merely a symptom.
|
| Any company, large or small, that allows uploads of image
| content without strict identity verification of the uploader is
| going to be a vehicle for this junk. I had a super popular
| website in this space, as soon as I figured out what was going
| on I shut it down, I am of the opinion that it is not possible
| to run a service like that in a responsible way without causing
| damage somewhere.
| forkLding wrote:
| What if you put in strict identity verification and the
| uploader is identified but still decided to upload a NSFW or
| disturbing image?
| jaredmosley wrote:
| Then, assuming those kinds of images are against your TOS,
| then you ban them. This drastically reduces the number of
| images of that nature that are uploaded not only by
| ensuring they can't do it again but also by heavily
| disincentivizing them from doing it in the first place.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Beyond that, if the content they post is illegal, there's
| a more clear path to prosecution than if the content is
| posted anonymously.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| >>> _Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety
| measures in 2021_
|
| Considering the size of the platform ~$130B/year; $5B per year
| spent on platform safety, while substantial, seems low as a
| percentage of revenue.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It probably doesn't scale linearly with revenue.
| blululu wrote:
| That's much more than I would have expected. ~3.5% is a
| significant operating expense. Not sure why it should be
| higher. Most companies don't spend that much on R&D for example
| (tech companies are exceptional in this regard).
| neves wrote:
| It looks like a low value for a content company. The terrible
| track record of FB in this regard clearly indicates that they
| aren't investing enough.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| I'd argue it's sufficient I if the problem of moderating
| content was a non-issue. However the article points out the
| problematic nature of the way content moderation currently
| works. Given that content moderation is core to their
| business, I'd expect the percentage spend to be >5%. By
| comparison they spend about 2x on Oculus.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Interesting to see that the vendor in question is Sama (formerly
| Samasource), which started out as a nonprofit but was then turned
| into a for-profit company (the founder has since passed away).
| Wonder if this was the catalyst for its corruption.
| mabbo wrote:
| Here is the crux of the problem, in my mind: Does Facebook have
| more of a prerogative to help people in Africa or to maximize
| profits/value for shareholders (primary among them, Zuckerberg)?
| And the answer is complicated.
|
| In an actual free-market system, Facebook would want to reduce
| costs because it wants to reduce prices to stay ahead of
| competition. But Facebook doesn't have much competition, or
| monetary prices. And so Facebook doesn't act like a competitive
| company, it acts like a monopoly maximizing its exploitation of a
| resource it controls.
|
| If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing its
| price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs. But it actually does the
| opposite.
|
| Which takes me back to the original question: When Facebook is in
| this market-power position, is it really it's prerogative just to
| make as much money as possible?
| pc86 wrote:
| > _If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing
| its price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs._
|
| This doesn't track for me. Let's assume there are 2-3 other
| competitive social networks that FB has to compete against. FB
| figures out how to do $thing that reduces its costs by 10%.
|
| Why does it follow that FB is going to show fewer ads now?
| mabbo wrote:
| If prices were in terms of money, then a company should want
| to undercut its competitors. This would overall be a net-win
| for it, as customers would move more to use its services than
| the competition. This would force the competition to ALSO
| find ways to reduce costs.
|
| The end winner is the consumer in such a scenario as prices
| keep dropping.
|
| But here, the price we pay is ads, and it's hard to even
| evaluate where you saw more ads. People don't pick a social
| network by the number of ads (short of there being so many it
| gets in the way), they pick social networks by where their
| friends already are. The bigger a network is, the more likely
| someone is to use it.
|
| Facebook's economics exploit this network effect. They don't
| need to make the 'price' better (ads) because that isn't what
| drives consumers to it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Does Facebook have more of a prerogative to help people in
| Africa or to maximize profits/value for shareholders (primary
| among them, Zuckerberg)? And the answer is complicated.
|
| Flip that question around.
|
| Given that we know from various leakers, that facebook doesn't
| have very much capacity for anything that isn't english, do you
| think they have the expertise to recruit, train and verify
| people at scale in kenya?
|
| I mean _they should_ but they clearly dont.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Facebook doesn't have a lot of completion? Tiktok is destroying
| FB. Then there's snap, telegram, Twitter, etc.
| trasz wrote:
| Personally I don't see how the choice between helping people
| and making money for shareholders could be any simpler.
| cosheaf wrote:
| If you take this to its logical conclusion then you're
| essentially describing the paperclip maximizer from Bostrom's
| book about the dangers of artificially intelligent systems that
| destroy humanity at the expense of maximizing their own
| operation. Contemporary corporations are essentially paperclip
| maximizers.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Yet another dark side of the "free", or "user is the product".
|
| This could be prevented by changing the law so that it treats
| any large enough social platform as a communication service
| provider, requiring it to provide open API with complete
| feature coverage. This would facilitate native feature-complete
| third-party cross-platform clients that don't show any ads, and
| platforms would _have_ to charge users because no one will be
| stupid enough not to use a client like that.
|
| And once service is no longer free and cross-platform clients
| exist, the space will finally start resembling an actual free
| market--honest competitors will stand a chance, and actual end
| users will be able to vote with their wallet.
| shafyy wrote:
| The EU is working on such a law, it's part of the Digital
| Markets Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-20
| 19-2024/euro...
| strogonoff wrote:
| That's promising, and I like that it explicitly applies to
| _large_ online platforms. That said,
|
| > allow third parties to inter-operate with the
| gatekeeper's own services in certain specific situations
|
| With "certain specific situations" presumably they are
| trying to make it viable for a monopoly to innovate, but as
| is it's open to interpretation and may just result in
| platforms innovating specifically to maintain monopoly and
| the double-market scenario where they sell to advertisers
| and only care about users insofar as their eyeballs don't
| leave en masse.
|
| IMO a good law would specifically aim to make it
| _infeasible_ to operate as a double-sided market and
| pretend to offer a free product to the users while actually
| being supported by advertisers. I suspect this can only be
| achieved by an all-encompassing interoperation requirement
| (a.k.a. open API). In this document, however,
| "interoperability" seems to mean hardware and OS (?).
| shafyy wrote:
| Yes, I'm not sure what "specific sutations" refers to,
| but I don't think they mean hardware and OS. It remains
| to be seen if and it what specific form this proposed act
| will come to pass.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| >no one will be stupid enough not to use a client like that.
|
| Twitter allows exactly that (or used to, unsure if the API is
| still up): an API for third parties to use it's content and
| make alternative front-ends, like Nitter. How many people use
| them? I don't know, but I'd bet my liver (non-binding offer)
| it's a minuscule fraction of it's users.
|
| Browsers allow to purge just about every ad from your
| Internet in a handful of clicks. How many people use them? A
| mere 27% in the US [0]
|
| Non-Chrome mobile browsers allow extensions to purge ads too
| (savvy Google killed the Chrome store as they couldn't just
| kill adblockers, yet managed to stay dominant.. power of
| brands). How many people use them on Android? A laughable 14%
| [1]. Of which a fraction will be ad-blocking.
|
| People are not idiots, but it's just not as simple as "offer
| an ad-free/superior alternative and people will flock to it".
| People are creatures of habits, if they learned to go to
| twitter.com or facebook.com, it doesn't matter how much
| better your alt-front-end is; even if you don't have to
| compete with the network effect as you'd share the backbone,
| it will be a steep, steep uphill battle to gain traction.
|
| 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-
| reach...
|
| 1: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx
| chottocharaii wrote:
| Regulation is obviously needed
| pklee wrote:
| Radiolab had a similar post sometime back. That was about
| philippines -
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| They were similar articles written about subcontractors and
| their moderators in Ireland. This isn't just Africa and just
| Facebook.
|
| It's all social media.
|
| I guess the only ones that get away with a moderation made by
| unpaid volunteers at scale is reddit, since it's their entire
| business model. The real question is, what kind of individual
| is "moderating" that place...
| toqy wrote:
| Reddit has to have some kind of moderation other than the
| volunteer sub moderators, otherwise people could just illegal
| content in a private subreddit
| delegate wrote:
| Genuine question: Who posts this content ? Are there really that
| many people who do this ? Can't they be banned on first offense ?
| bhelkey wrote:
| > Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety
| measures in 2021.
|
| I suspect that Facebook does ban folks but that the people who
| do it attempt to get around the bans. If this could be solved
| by banning the people who do this, I imagine Facebook would
| have done that already and pocketed the 5 Billion dollars.
| packetslave wrote:
| Remember that guy who live-streamed his killing spree on
| Facebook a few years back? It got taken down. _Hundreds_ of
| reposts of the video were automatically blocked before anyone
| saw them. The small percentage of reposts that DID make it to
| live? People modifying the video (flipping, cropping, re-
| encoding, etc) _explicitly_ to get around the machine
| moderation. Those eventually got taken down by content
| moderators.
|
| There are a lot of shitty people out there doing shitty
| things to get attention.
| aught wrote:
| Its not that the work doesn't need to be done its the
| compensation for the work not being adequate and the lack of
| safeguards in place. Doing a hazardous job is one thing but they
| need to provide appropriate care for those workers as well as
| compensation equitable for the hazards daily and in aggregate.
| bArray wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is supposed to cause outrage or not. I know
| for example companies like Facebook recruit in places like
| Holland too [1]. I'm also aware that such jobs exist for checking
| child pornography too. These are not nice jobs, but they do need
| to be done. The important part is that people in these roles
| receive phycological support too, which I doubt they get when
| working for tech companies.
|
| I always thought that a better model for moderation would be to
| distribute the effort. There will be people in my social bubble
| with similar reactions to the same content and once an algorithm
| understands these connections, it can distribute the effort of
| moderation amongst these like-minded people.
|
| Another moderation tool would be to simply allow people to trade
| reputation (which has some value in terms of audience reach) for
| correctly tagging content.
|
| On a different note, if you outsource your censorship, you will
| undoubtedly end up being censored based on the political ideology
| of the person doing the censoring.
|
| [1] https://jobsfactor.eu/job/49057/dutch-content-moderator/
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > There will be people in my social bubble with similar
| reactions to the same content
|
| I don't want reactionary right-wingers on Facebook moderating
| other reactionary right-wingers' content on Facebook.
| acdha wrote:
| > I always thought that a better model for moderation would be
| to distribute the effort. There will be people in my social
| bubble with similar reactions to the same content and once an
| algorithm understands these connections, it can distribute the
| effort of moderation amongst these like-minded people.
|
| This can work in some scenarios, or when the junk is basically
| randomly distributed -- e.g. flagging people spamming random
| business links -- but it's a lot harder when you have
| coordinated attempts with resources. That's been heavily used
| to game things like Facebook or Twitter and it's not just bots
| -- someone saying "go here and retweet it" can generate a lot
| of activity from humans who are decidedly not neutral. That can
| be done for profit, political reasons, or griefing and the
| latter two can be quite hard to detect.
|
| I'm not sure we have a great solution for this other than
| destroying the model those companies currently have of
| surfacing popular/trending content based on the activity of
| people you don't follow.
| brimble wrote:
| > but they do need to be done.
|
| They _do not_ need to be done.
|
| Facebook needs them to be done for its business model to work.
|
| You may have meant (surely did mean?) the latter, but I think
| the distinction is important.
|
| None of these people _need_ to be subjected to psychologically
| harmful material on an industrial scale. We could always just
| not let Facebook do that, and they 'd have to live or die as a
| company without doing those things. Possibly it would mean
| broadcast-type social media couldn't exist anymore. If so, then
| the cost of keeping that seems to be hurting people with this
| kind of work. But it is something we could _stop doing_ if we
| wanted to.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| No, they do need to be done. After years of self-description
| as, what was it, some term, but in practice "the new new
| thing," a social network, and comparing itself to a door...or
| a chair? Which one was the satire? Well after all that self-
| presentation as a mysterious fundamental, ineffable thing,
| Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed it was "between a newspaper
| and a telecom."
|
| So, as something somewhere between a newspaper and a telecom.
|
| I suppose it could have been carried out in the late 80s
| through the telephone system if people left messages by
| calling 1-800-FACE-BOOK, and maybe touch-tone dialed text for
| the title, and then to check what your friends wrote you
| called 1-800-FACE-BOOK again, and after combining your
| friends' submissions it would call you back. It would let you
| select which you wanted to play by operating on the digital
| titles, again by dialing, and when you found one you wanted
| to hear it would play you the recording your friend wrote.
| And not only would it be less viable, in the 80s it would
| cost money to use, and have no advertising.
|
| Just not viable. These days, it's viable, and there has just
| been too much in capitalist subsidies to return to a time
| before images. There was a time when condensing the sight
| before your eyes into two dimensions meant buying rolls of
| photos, taking a dedicated device that could imprint on them
| the light of reality, giving it time to use the material well
| until there was enough to justify a trip to get it developed
| --first dropping it off, writing down in a paper agenda to
| return in a few days, then returning and paying--and only
| then would you witness what the camera witnessed. And then
| cataloging the photographs in an album, and keeping that
| album on a shelf with all the other books--there were all
| sorts of different books for all sorts of things--and
| finally, years in the future, reviewing the photographs to
| relive the past.
|
| But so much has been spent into making this process trivial.
| I would estimate trillions in R&D and subsidizing the
| semiconductors that made all the machinery that came before
| it a thing of the past. Not to mention bandwidth, without
| which sharing images on the web was still possible over the
| course of hours.
|
| On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right now,
| in choosing a social network that doesn't use images in
| almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-based
| nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble.
| brimble wrote:
| No-one's making anyone else _default_ to publishing any ol
| ' thing people send them. That's what's new and, I think,
| _not obviously_ a reasonable thing to do. If there 'd been
| a magazine publisher in the '80s that defaulted to
| automatically publishing whatever people mailed in, unless
| a human happened to catch that it shouldn't go out, the
| _obviously_ correct solution to folks at the time would be
| for them to _stop doing that_. Not hire offices full of
| people to look at terrible material all day to catch some
| fraction of the worst stuff (while still letting a lot
| through).
|
| Mine is an argument _against_ "it's different because it's
| on the Internet", which as far as I can tell is the whole
| of the argument for this practice. Put it in the real world
| and it's instantly clear that they should just _stop_.
|
| > On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right
| now, in choosing a social network that doesn't use images
| in almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-
| based nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble.
|
| "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" :-)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| How else do you arbitrate and stop stuff of this kind?
|
| Any kind of large scale communications platform that allows
| file/photo sharing will need to do something like this. In
| fact the requirement to do it is about to get stronger if the
| UK has it's way.
|
| The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad actors
| monopolise a communications channel to broadcast literal shit
| at me, my children and friends.
| brimble wrote:
| > Any kind of large scale communications platform that
| allows file/photo sharing will need to do something like
| this. In fact the requirement to do it is about to get
| stronger if the UK has it's way.
|
| Possibly, accepting submissions from _anyone on Earth_ and
| then publishing most of them automatically is fundamentally
| a bad idea and should not be done.
|
| > The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad
| actors monopolise a communications channel to broadcast
| literal shit at me, my children and friends.
|
| I don't see how this follows. If anything, the
| centralization of attention driven by the current system is
| what does that.
| coryrc wrote:
| You're so on the money and it's so far out the Overton window
| the sibling replies can't even comprehend what you clearly
| wrote. It's wild.
| brimble wrote:
| Yeah. Been a roller coaster in the fake Internet points
| like no other post I've ever made.
|
| I dunno, one day (years ago, now?) I was _yet again_
| reading a post like "well it's a shame these workers
| suffer horribly and maybe we can do some stuff to help, but
| the work _has to be_ done " and it occurred to me that I
| was reading someone defending billions-of-dollars
| corporations with exactly the same reasoning that a kid
| uses when they say another kid "made them" punch them, and
| then we were all hand-wringing over which color of medical
| tape to put on the victim's nose (I mean, clearly the kid
| _had_ to get punched, everyone agrees on that and you must
| be crazy if you don 't, but we should try to help!) instead
| of stepping back and going "what if the problem is that
| there's punching happening in the first place?"
|
| The whole framing of the problem, as it's most commonly
| expressed, is myopic and deflects from whole categories of
| solutions (that are very inconvenient to a few Internet
| giants that dominate the attention economy).
| celtain wrote:
| If regular people are allowed to share media with the world,
| and some kinds of content remain illegal, content moderation
| will need to exist.
|
| Unless you're suggesting that we return to an era in which
| the only way to publish content is with the approval of
| someone like a newspaper editor or book publisher, these jobs
| will need to be done.
| brimble wrote:
| Send messages directly to people you know, or become a
| publisher (on your own website). If social media as we know
| it dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it'd still
| be easier than ever before in history to get one's message
| out, by a long shot.
|
| It'd be significantly tougher for _advertisers_ and _PR
| agencies_ , however.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| > It'd be significantly tougher for advertisers and PR
| agencies, however.
|
| Good. We shouldn't allow habitual liars to determine
| what's possible, or make their lives easier. I'd happily
| grind the social media, advertising, and public relations
| "industries" into dust for the good of us all.
| kleinsch wrote:
| You write on a many-to-many social media website kept up
| by active content moderation...
| brimble wrote:
| Twice in one thread! I'll just recycle this from my other
| post:
|
| "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
| bhelkey wrote:
| This doesn't apply here. One-to-one platforms exist and
| are popular. Also, I very much doubt that this
| conversation is required or in any way helps your career.
| There are alternatives, you chose to come on this site
| and participate in the comments.
|
| Your stated view isn't that many-to-many moderated social
| media website should do better, it is that many-to-many
| moderated social media websites shouldn't exist. Because
| this is a recreational activity, and because the
| alternatives you suggested are massively popular, 'Yet
| you participate in society. Curious!' does not apply.
| brimble wrote:
| It is not possible to use popular forms of communication
| to criticize popular forms of communication, in good
| faith.
|
| Message received loud and clear.
|
| It's not a good message, to put it about as nicely as I
| possibly can, but I've received it.
| yunohn wrote:
| That's not what everyone else is saying, necessarily -
| it's just that you think getting rid of FB et all will
| remove the need for content moderation, by forcing only
| one-to-one communication alternatives. None of that is
| reasonable or desirable by most humans.
| brimble wrote:
| > it's just that you think getting rid of FB et all will
| remove the need for content moderation,
|
| Nooooo. I mean, yes, content moderation in the modern
| sense of "trying to mitigate the insanity that is randos
| posting a firehose of crap that's by-default instantly
| published to the world and which our stupid algorithms
| may well choose to shove in lots of people's faces" but
| no in the sense of selecting what one chooses to publish
| from among some submissions, which pre-dates the Internet
| sense of "content moderation" and doesn't seem to be a
| problem _unless_ you have a publish-by-default-without-
| review policy that lets some amount of the crap get
| through, and barely vet your submitters at all.
|
| > None of that is reasonable or desirable by most humans.
|
| OK. So we choose-- _choose_ --to have a job category that
| will cause significant, lasting harm to some percentage
| of the workers doing it.
|
| But let's stop also insulting them by claiming we're
| doing it because we "have to".
| mannerheim wrote:
| If tomorrow everyone switched to email for all their
| communication needs, the day after tomorrow we would hear
| moral panic over CSAM in emails, and the day after that,
| every email provider that doesn't already do so will
| implement content moderation.
| iakov wrote:
| To be honest I loved it more back in the "old days". The
| barrier of entry to sharing your mind with the world was so
| much higher - you had to be on the TV, radio or at least a
| newspaper or a book to do that. Even with the advent of the
| Internet the barrier was still high - you had to set up
| your website or blog page, which was a fairly technical
| endeavor for some time.
|
| Now every god damn idiot can have a Twitter page or a
| Facebook echo chamber group and easily spread their
| bullshit there. Yeah, I wouldn't mind going back to that
| era you mention.
| DaltonCoffee wrote:
| You might have liked it even better in the "older old
| days" when only the enlightened aristocracy had free
| speech, and speaking out against them was a crime.
| riffraff wrote:
| > you had to set up your website or blog page, which was
| a fairly technical endeavor for some time.
|
| usenet and web forums have existed for a very long time
| before blogs. It didn't take much to spam newsgroups or
| online bulletin pages.
| yholio wrote:
| > They do not need to be done.
|
| You have surely never operated a website that publishes user
| generated content. Every available textbox and file uploader
| will be filled with garbage so revolting that, without
| moderation, will quickly kill any chance of respectability
| for your site.
| brimble wrote:
| You're missing the point. Yes, if you let randos upload
| publicly-visible media to your site you'll need to check it
| for illegal material (or, if you're a bigco, pay hundreds
| or thousands of other people to do it, because god knows
| the CEO, president, board, et c., won't subject themselves
| to that).
|
| If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also
| need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And
| by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean
| "some other people'll".
|
| But you could... not do that.
| Edman274 wrote:
| If you're arguing in good faith you should probably
| explicitly acknowledge that you recognize that you're
| using hacker news to argue that a website like hacker
| news shouldn't exist. Do you think that no one is paid to
| moderate this site? Do you think that no one has tried to
| spam illegal content here before?
| brimble wrote:
| _Three_ times with: "Yet you participate in society.
| Curious!" in the thread! I wasn't even _trying_ to get
| those kinds of responses. Amazing.
| Edman274 wrote:
| The reason that the "yet you participate in society"
| argument works in the original comic you're quoting is
| that the peasant with sticks on his back is saying "we
| should improve society somewhat" and the peasant isn't
| allowed to choose whether they participate in a society.
| The reason what you're saying is not convincing, and why
| people keep pointing it out, is that you're saying in
| effect "a product that I freely use should never have
| existed".
|
| Let me spell it out for you. * The peasant doesn't get to
| choose whether he participates in society. * The peasant
| wants to improve society.
|
| Here's you: * You get to choose whether you use hacker
| news, and you have decided to use hacker news. * You
| think that websites like hacker news should not exist.
|
| Do you see why your argument isn't convincing? Your
| riposte of "yet you participate in society" could be used
| for literally anything. You're saying that hacker news
| shouldn't exist, but you don't actually believe that. If
| you argue things you don't believe, it's not really a
| good faith discussion.
| brimble wrote:
| > The reason that the "yet you participate in society"
| argument works in the original comic you're quoting is
| that the peasant with sticks on his back is saying "we
| should improve society somewhat" and the peasant isn't
| allowed to choose whether they participate in a society.
|
| If we're gonna cite the comic, three out of the four
| panels of the comic do not rely on this, and are
| precisely about using something by choice even while
| saying they should be different. The last panel is even
| more extreme because it's funnier that way, presumably,
| but the core point does not rely on lack of choice.
|
| The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that
| Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car
| without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have
| seatbelts.
|
| > but you don't actually believe that.
|
| Nice mind reading. Shall I baselessly speculate about
| your posts while accusing you of being a bad actor, too?
| No, no I shall not.
| Edman274 wrote:
| Sure, but you chose only the last panel as your witty
| rebuttal. Honestly, I don't think that the first panel is
| that off. If you go on the internet to criticize a
| company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the
| fact that you're doing something that's a little
| hypocritical. People see the contradiction and then
| wonder how strong the conviction and argument is when the
| person making the contradiction is hidden.
|
| You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not
| describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment.
| Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user
| input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles
| are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input,
| then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The
| comics describe a scenario where something is improved.
| What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
|
| Let's ask this:
|
| 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its
| current form?
|
| 2. If not, what would you change?
|
| 3. Do you use it?
|
| 4. Do you think that it should exist?
|
| 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook,
| such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative
| answer to 5?
| brimble wrote:
| > If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be
| intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that
| you're doing something that's a little hypocritical.
|
| It's not, though? Else we are all constantly hypocrites
| in this regard. We may think the electoral system is
| broken and should be reformed, yet rarely vote for a
| candidate who supports that (because the current system
| provides few such candidates), et c. So calling it out
| seems pointless. We all deal with imperfect information
| and with the choices that the current system presents,
| but not others that might exist (or, rather, represent
| more-practical alternatives than they do now) instead, if
| the system were different. Prefacing criticism with
| public confessions when it's not _very_ relevant is just
| a waste of space, and is stating the obvious.
|
| > You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not
| describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment.
| Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user
| input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles
| are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input,
| then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The
| comics describe a scenario where something is improved.
| What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
|
| The "something" being improved would be worker
| protections, essentially. Publishing other people's stuff
| would probably require human review of it _all_. Given
| that AFAIK publishing houses aren 't inundated with
| tsunamis of abusive content, I don't think that level of
| review is a problem in practice, as far as being abusive
| to the people doing the work--rather, it's the fact that
| abuse gets through with some regularity, that draws it in
| the first place. What's done now with review of user-
| posted online content clearly is hurting people, and it's
| _the way certain businesses operate_ that are causing the
| problem.
|
| If you asked me to draft legislation for this, I'd at
| least consider a carve-out for very small (low head
| count) operations. That's already super common in all
| kinds of business and, specifically, worker protection,
| regulations.
|
| > 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its
| current form?
|
| It doesn't seem to be a significant part of the problem,
| no, but I'd happily lose it in the name of reforming
| social media (=publishers with terribly lax submission
| and go-to-print standards) generally.
|
| > 2. If not, what would you change?
|
| Oh man. Nothing related to this, actually. Probably put
| in better poster-identity-tracking capabilities so it's
| easier to remember when you've already been down an
| unproductive garbage-thread with someone, or watched
| someone else do it (I do not have present company in mind
| here, to be clear) and over time people prone to creating
| those stop drawing replies at all and hopefully go away.
| There's a _lot_ of inside-the-rules shitty posting that
| can 't easily be user-policed right now, as it is on some
| other sites. I get the motivation behind weakening poster
| identity across threads, but I think it's beyond clear
| that it does more harm than good, now. Posters I read
| elsewhere today on HN, who were wondering how some
| subreddits can see HN as a cesspit: this is a big part of
| why.
|
| The main downside is that meta-discussion about who's
| what kind of poster is low-value noise, but norms around
| here do an OK job of policing worse than that (provided
| the content being policed follows a clear pattern), so I
| think it'd work out OK. Just allowing personal tags for
| users, maybe with color-coding (visible only to the
| tagger) for posts, would go a long way. Some kind of
| hide-user functionality might help too, though it'd take
| some thought to make it work OK with HN's threading.
| Probably have to hide entire sub-trees they're at the
| root of, but I've definitely seen users for whom doing
| that would strictly improve my reading experience and I
| wouldn't miss a thing worth reading.
|
| > 3. Do you use it?
|
| LOL.
|
| > 4. Do you think that it should exist?
|
| Again, I'm not sure the entire _category of thing_ is,
| fundamentally, not a crazy thing to bring into the world.
| It 's like having an open email relay then trying to
| police messages passing through. Clearly insane. But,
| also again, most of the harm seems to kick in at scale.
| So, I dunno, maybe.
|
| > 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook,
| such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative
| answer to 5?
|
| Chiefly in size. Fewer users, fewer employees, _way_ less
| visual or auditory media to evaluate as a percentage of
| posts (I 'm counting links, or it'd be zero). Arguments
| in favor of one and not the other are purely the
| practical sort--what's doing harm _in practice_ , and how
| do you narrow in on that as specifically as possible--not
| the iron-clad-pure-reason sort; but, again, that's a
| pretty common approach with this kind of thing, for good
| reason.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that
| Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car
| without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have
| seatbelts.
|
| This is more akin to posting from an iPhone and saying
| phones shouldn't exist.
| brimble wrote:
| If someone wrote an op-ed saying they thought newspapers
| should be abolished, including some amount of explanation
| for why, sent it to the NYT, and the NYT published it,
| would you think that's slam-dunk proof that the author of
| the op ed is lying?
| mannerheim wrote:
| I'd be a bit confused if it turned out the author was a
| regular reader of the Gray Lady.
| brimble wrote:
| Why?
|
| You may also be surprised to find out I'd prefer much
| more bike- and walking-friendly city planning, even to
| the point of making it harder to drive places, while in
| fact I drive almost everywhere.
|
| Dealing with the current reality does not prevent one
| from advocating something else. Am I the one taking crazy
| pills, thinking that's super-obvious?
| mannerheim wrote:
| It's possible to make the case that you need to drive to
| get somewhere. Recreation is an entirely different
| matter. You don't need to read the New York Times. You
| don't need to read or post on Hacker News, either. You
| could go your entire life without these things at very
| little personal cost. In fact, it costs your attention to
| be doing these.
|
| The fact that you supposedly hold such a strong position
| as saying 'this platform shouldn't exist' when the cost
| to you for not using this platform is minimal makes very
| little sense to me. For the example of a phone, it's not
| entirely incongruent for someone who's already bought an
| iPhone to be upset with Apple, and if they generally wish
| to use a phone, other companies might not be much better.
| But if somehow they get the notion that phones or
| smartphones shouldn't exist at all and continued using
| them, that doesn't make sense. I know people who get
| around fine without smartphones. If somebody really
| thought smartphones shouldn't exist yet continued using
| them, I question the strength of their convictions, and
| am more inclined to believe they hold their position more
| for the value of controversy than genuine belief.
| brimble wrote:
| I think what's twisting people up is that I'm advocating
| a position that might ( _maybe_ ) threaten this site if
| it became more popular, but I'm not advocating that
| position _because I don 't like using HN_. I'm not even
| advocating the position because I don't like Facebook's
| _site_ or _functionality_. The two things are hardly
| connected, except that the harmful part of it may be (as
| advocates of these services typically claim) necessary
| for them to operate as they currently do.
|
| I object to the idea that we _have to_ psychologically
| wreck some workers. No, _Facebook_ (and Twitter, et c.)
| do, to stay in business, evidently. _We_ don 't have to.
| _We_ could say they aren 't allowed to do that anymore,
| as we have with other worker safety issues in the past.
| We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm
| operations and cases in which that kind of work really is
| something resembling necessary (police work, say).
| There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police
| investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've
| seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that
| similar worker protection regulations deal with those
| sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations
| couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a
| problem any other time), I'd _personally_ be OK losing HN
| over that, sure.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten
| this site
|
| You seem to be advocating a position that content
| moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not
| exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an
| exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site
| should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps
| you should explain how this site, which consists entirely
| and exclusively of user-generated content, would get
| around without content moderation, or why that content
| moderation would be acceptable.
|
| > I'm not advocating that position because I don't like
| using HN.
|
| I'm not sure what that has to do with it. If I heard
| someone advocating that, for instance, meat should be
| abolished because it's murder (or something along those
| lines), I would be perplexed if the person advocating
| that continued to eat meat. It wouldn't do anything to
| lessen my confusion if they told me they're not
| advocating that because they don't enjoy eating meat;
| that part makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is
| both having that point of view, and continuing to to
| engage in that behaviour.
|
| Now, if this individual instead had the position that
| meat should be taxed, or that people should cut back on
| their meat consumption because of its impact on the
| environment, I don't see an incongruence there. But if
| they hold the position that it should be banned entirely,
| that doesn't strike me as a deeply-held conviction if
| they continue to eat meat.
|
| Likewise, for our NYT op-ed writer, if they, e.g., once
| read newspapers and then decided they were garbage that
| needed to be abolished, then perhaps there's no
| incongruence there. If I see him next week with the
| Sunday Times in hand, I would then gather that perhaps
| the position he advocated he wasn't serious about.
| toqy wrote:
| Are you arguing in good faith? Do you think moderating
| text on this site is equivalent to what is described in
| the article?
| Edman274 wrote:
| Brimble said "If you have advertisers (or just standards)
| you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's
| not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like
| Facebook, I mean "some other people'll".
|
| But you could... not do that."
|
| Hacker news and Facebook:
|
| 1. Have advertisers (and just standards)
|
| 2. Check it for horrible stuff that's "not illegal"
|
| 3. Using "some other people'll" that are paid with money.
|
| Now, here's the thing. Facebook and Hacker news are not
| equivalent in quality or quantity when it comes to how
| much illegal or horrible content is uploaded to them. But
| they both have advertisers, a risk of bad content, and
| use at least one paid moderator to prevent bad content
| from existing. Brimble is saying that Facebook and other
| hypothetical services could "not do that", which either
| means that:
|
| 1. The website / service will not exist or
|
| 2. Paid moderation on that service will not exist or
|
| 3. Moderation on that service will not exist or
|
| 4. User created content on that service will not exist.
|
| That would affect Facebook and hacker news. No, I do not
| believe that hacker news is exposed to as much illegal
| and horrible content as Facebook. However, it _is_
| exposed to some, and it seems like the remedy in both
| cases is for the website to not exist. I 'm pretty sure
| that if someone asked dang whether they had ever, in
| their years of moderating this site, seen something that
| disturbed them, he'd answer yes. I'm certain of it.
| camdat wrote:
| So the medium is the only point of contention? If HN
| supported image uploads you'd argue it shouldn't exist?
| stickfigure wrote:
| Who is this "we"? If you pulverized Facebook et al to dust,
| people like me would recreate something equivalent. Human
| beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent
| something to fill that void.
|
| That passive-voice "social media couldn't exist anymore"
| implies an Orwellian bureaucracy that meticulously controls
| who is allowed to talk to whom. Someone has to enforce it.
| brimble wrote:
| I don't think it's anywhere near being a stretch that
| having an entire job that consists of psychologically
| harmful activity would fall under current or non-radical
| future workplace safety laws. At which point doing it just
| because your business model doesn't work without causing
| that harm, would be illegal.
|
| _No one_ is forcing Facebook to harm people like this.
| They choose to, in order to make money. We choose to allow
| the creation of jobs that are guaranteed to cause that kind
| of harm. My objection is to framing this as work that
| "has" to be done, as if there's no choice.
|
| > Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will
| invent something to fill that void.
|
| Right. We have Email and messaging apps. Websites would
| still exist and are dirt-cheap to start up, if someone
| wants to write for the public. Possibly social media could
| survive somehow, IDK, but _they 're_ (and their supporters)
| the ones saying they "have to" work this way. If so, maybe
| they should "have to" stop being in business.
| stickfigure wrote:
| You can say the exact same thing about law enforcement,
| and I presume you don't want to disband homicide and sex
| crimes enforcement.
|
| There's a lot of variety in human brains. What will
| traumatize one person is comedy for another. There are
| (or at least used to be) websites you can seek out to
| look at pictures of grizzly death. It's simply not the
| case that everyone is damaged by looking at terrible
| things, and - to cut off that line of thought - the
| people who aren't are not monsters or sociopaths. They're
| just made of different stuff. I can't comment on whether
| Facebook et al are careful enough in their hiring
| practices, but I'm certain that there are plenty of
| people in the world that _can_ do this job.
|
| Email lists were popular before Facebook took over that
| niche. Nobody more than I would rather see the comeback
| of mailing lists, but that doesn't solve the problem. You
| can assume that if mailing lists got the kind of uptake
| that Facebook has, gmail/hotmail/etc would have the same
| content curation issues.
|
| I'm still not sure exactly what you are proposing.
| Facebook gives me a way to communicate with my friends.
| It sounds like you want to take that away.
| brimble wrote:
| > I'm still not sure exactly what you are proposing.
| Facebook gives me a way to communicate with my friends.
| It sounds like you want to take that away.
|
| I want us to stop allowing that business models that rely
| on harming workers _must_ exist. We may choose to allow
| it, but it 's a choice. They do not "have to" do it, and
| we do not "have to" let them do it.
|
| I hate discussion of harm to these workers that frames it
| as "well, it sucks, but we have to". We. Do. Not. Have.
| To. We may choose to, but we don't have to. We don't even
| have to if we want efficient mass communication. We have
| to if we want _a few publishers_ to be able to corner and
| monetize the attention economy.
| bryan_w wrote:
| I don't get what you mean. If there was a large enough
| mailing list, people would send this stuff on it and then
| the list would become moderated and we would be back at
| square one.
|
| I'm sure the Linux kernel mailing list gets tons of vile
| things sent to it all the time which are filtered out.
|
| I don't see why we have to involve business models at
| all. Any large all to all communication medium is going
| to have this issue and the only way to prevent it is to
| devolve back to the cable tv/newspaper era where people
| only consume content.
| beardedetim wrote:
| If I wanted to start a media hosting service for me and
| my community (_local, only within an N-block radius of my
| hosting device_), who would you expect to be held liable
| if the hard drives associated with that device held
| something illegal in those N-blocks?
| brimble wrote:
| If you were also publishing those files to the entire
| world, changing the formatting to suit your site's needs
| & branding, algorithmically selecting the pieces of media
| that draw "engagement" and preferentially putting those
| in front of people, burying others, _and also_ publishing
| ads alongside all that, I 'd not hesitate a bit to say
| that _you_ should be, at least in large part.
|
| Facebook's a magazine publisher at massive scale, that
| relies on worst-in-class submission and acceptance
| processes to make money. They're not in the file storage
| business.
| beardedetim wrote:
| Are you saying that if _any one of those_ things isn't
| true that it's _not my responsibility_ for the bits on
| that machine? I am losing the thread here a bit and am
| not clear on what you are trying to say or how you're
| answering my question. Apologies.
| brimble wrote:
| I'm saying that I don't think "file storage service for
| locals" is even in the same product category as what
| Facebook does, even putting scale aside. They're an ad-
| supported publisher with _extremely_ lax standards. A
| file storage, or even file _sharing_ , service, isn't
| necessarily that, and it would take several steps to
| bridge that gap and travel from "not at all comparable to
| Facebook", through "grey area", and into "OK, now we're
| talking about something pretty similar to Facebook (and
| to Twitter, et c.)".
| beardedetim wrote:
| For sure agree these are totally different and the space
| between them vast! I was asking directly about a specific
| use-case so that I can better understand your perspective
| on who is responsible for the bits stored on a hard
| drive.
| brimble wrote:
| Ah, cool. I think of a file storage service more like a
| bank safe deposit box: you have rules, and there are
| laws, someone breaks them and you find out (or the cops
| do) that's on them. No-one expects you to carefully
| search every box (indeed, they'd likely be upset if you
| did) and you're not responsible if something illegal is
| put in there that you couldn't reasonably have known
| about (like, if someone _tells you_ they 're gonna put
| illegal shit in there, then you would have a
| responsibility to, at least, deny them service, but
| you're not expected to crack open the box after they
| leave and poke around for rule and law violations).
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Huh? FB could very well stop this and settle for less
| 'efficient mass communication' via many possible methods.
| Such as limiting the user base, restricting communication
| to friends of friends only, etc.
|
| Obviously though a competitor with even less scruples
| will rise up and gobble up their marketshare if they did
| something that drastic. So the net result makes no
| difference.
|
| To actually prevent child pornography from getting shared
| would require a dictatorship censoring the entire
| internet. Sure it would be the government instead of
| multiple big private companies, but that seems even worse
| than the current situation?
|
| And if you go the other way and have millions of little
| networks, how do you plan on stopping all the bad stuff
| from being shared without an even more powerful and
| centralized dictatorship deciding who can form networks
| or not?
|
| If you mean to get rid of all censorship and let free
| sharing of child pornography, etc., that will not pass
| any democratic legislature, at least in the West, since
| the vast majority of people want to limit that.
|
| So in the end all alternatives would lead to even less
| freedom. Have you actually thought through any of this?
| pavlov wrote:
| A lot of moderation deals with actual legal requirements, e.g.
| detecting and reporting child porn.
|
| A company can't outsource that kind of responsibility to a
| bunch of algorithmically selected users.
| yholio wrote:
| Sure it can, if those users enter a suitable legal contract
| that gives them rights and obligations similar to paid
| employees.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can outsource the work, but the responsibility is still
| yours.
| vanusa wrote:
| _The important part is that people in these roles receive
| phycological support too,_
|
| That may be "the important part", but the article is very clear
| about the fact that, in you know, actual reality -- the workers
| at this company definitely are _not_ receiving meaningful
| support.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I'm not sure if this is supposed to cause outrage or not.
|
| I agree with you, but for different reasons. A ""sweatshop"" is
| much better that the agricultural and industrial protectionism
| used by the US and the EU to prevent African crops from
| reaching their markets.
|
| If you think about it on a systemic level, these subsidies are
| quite evil: we subsidize agriculture so that we don't need to
| buy their crops, then even worse: we dump the leftovers under
| names like "international aid" which limits the opportunity for
| a local industry to grow (same with clothes "donations": the
| local industry can't compete with a price of 0)
|
| In an ideal world, we would not do such things, crops would be
| grown where the weather and the labor market provide a cost
| advantage (Africa is warmer than Europe!), the consumers would
| benefit from cheaper prices, and other countries would
| industrialize, grow their middle class and GDP.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Africa is warmer than Europe!_
|
| Unless you're arguing the Sahara is a better environment to
| grow crops than the French countryside, that's not an
| advantage...
| csdvrx wrote:
| Look right below the Sahara, and I think you'll find a
| great environment to grow crops.
|
| As for the Sahara itself, all it needs is water, and I
| don't see any factor that would make the cost of drop-by-
| drop irrigation not competitive or produce more CO2 than
| keeping giant plastic tents warmed up in Europe (and
| irrigated, harvested...), especially considering the
| availability and abundance of solar power in the Sahara of
| all places!
| toyg wrote:
| Lol, "all it needs is water" is a bit reductionist.
| Obviously there are a ton of factors why certain stuff is
| still grown in Europe despite it being economically
| challenging to do so. Some of it is the actual _will_ to
| keep certain products typically local, for cultural
| reasons that are not going to change. Besides, the few
| times African countries ended up being economically
| reliant on crops for exports to rich markets, disaster
| followed when prices dropped (as they are wont to do from
| time to time). They are currently busy exporting all they
| can to China anyway...
|
| The African issues are many and multi-faceted, they won't
| be solved by growing more stuff than they already do.
| aliswe wrote:
| dont attribute to malice what you can attribute to
| incompetence.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Usually, I would agree, but here I think we have malice
| done under the plausible deniability of incompetence.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Pretty sure its just grift and good security posture.
|
| It's not good for ones country to be dependent on another
| for survival (food) which is why they subsidize local
| production. This even occurs on the state level in the US
| where (I only lived in costal states) costal states
| enforce a minimum percentage of land towards farm usage.
|
| International aid is just not letting a disaster go to
| waste. Obviously you'd allocate federal money to go to
| some corporation to administer food in disaster area
| otherwise they'd go under and not donate to you. Any
| second order effect of wrecking economies and etc won't
| be attributed to you so there is only upside.
| ashwagary wrote:
| Dedollarization fixes this issue, can't rob the world to
| subsidize crops and x,y,z in the future.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The reason you have subsidies for production is because it's
| in the interest of society to have stability in food
| production. Left solely to market forces, agriculture, which
| is incredibly capital intensive would be hit with wide price
| swings that ultimately impact production as farms go out of
| business.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I do not see any evidence of that, and I would see many
| reasons for the opposite: a worldwide trading network for
| food production would reduce the impact of price swings,
| and would provide the best insurance against local
| disruptions (ex: tsunami, draught...)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'd suggest looking around a bit... this stuff isn't
| exactly a secret.
|
| There was alot of very insightful writing during the New
| Deal era, where federal price supports were introduced.
| Later, in the late 60s/early 70s, stabilizing prices was
| a policy position taken to blunt the wartime inflation
| from Vietnam and the Cold War.
|
| That's not to say there aren't any downsides. The
| destruction of Mexican corn agriculture post NAFTA is an
| example. The world could drown in the bounty of cheap
| American corn.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| africa is poor precisely because agriculture is challenging.
| Africa is not an agricultural powerhouse, countries in more
| temperate regions are. See the indian plains, the yangtze
| delta in china, the american and canadian praries, western
| europe.
|
| Africa doesn't grow all that much so simply being warmer is a
| moot point. and yes, africa is a vast continent but the
| regions that permit agriculture are few. Southern africa and
| the Mediterranean to name just two.
| someluccc wrote:
| This is such a disingenuous article. It's not about facebook at
| all. It's about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants
| contract content moderation work.
|
| It critiques working conditions without providing any context as
| to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even
| average pay- jobs in those countries.
|
| Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment
| outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many
| -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mbesto wrote:
| > It critiques working conditions
|
| I guess you completely glossed over the main part of the
| article:
|
| > They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal
| or banned content
|
| Look, I'm a capitalist just like the next person, but
| subjecting ANY human being to the disgust of banned content on
| Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. _HAS_ to take an immeasurable
| mental toll.
|
| But hey, I guess you just focused on the "but how much are
| these guys making"...
| msrenee wrote:
| Also, very importantly, these employees were not informed
| that they would be reviewing this content until after the on
| boarding process. It seems like quite a few of the workers
| even relocated from places such as South Africa to Kenya
| before being informed what the work entailed.
| neves wrote:
| That is a twisted mindset. Sure FB is responsible for the
| working conditions of its contractors.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It's about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants
| contract content moderation work.
|
| Can you please cite a source for this claim? While it's true
| that Sama has partnerships with companies such as, according to
| the article and to Sama's website[1], Google, Microsoft and
| Wal-Mart, it's not entirely clear that they're also doing
| content moderation for all of them. They seem to offer a wide
| range of services.
|
| >Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady
| employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come
| by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind
| Africa alone
|
| Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more
| than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a
| horrible environment.
|
| [1]https://www.sama.com/
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Ah, right, because if you 're lucky enough to be making
| more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing
| so in a horrible environment._
|
| These are the best jobs these people can get. If the
| "sweatshop" closes down, they're be doing somewhere worse.
|
| Maybe you throw out this shitty provocation as a way to avoid
| thinking about that fact?
| jjulius wrote:
| If "the best jobs these people can get" amount to viewing
| untold volumes of graphic content of wildly varying
| extremes, then we should absolutely be having a
| conversation about how employers should be treating them.
|
| Edit: We can - and should - be working to improve
| conditions for everyone, but just because "these people"
| have it better relative to everyone else in their immediate
| vicinity doesn't mean they need to shut up, be thankful and
| deal with it.
| tclancy wrote:
| Whether they are the best jobs or not, the fact the company
| explains not paying more than US$1-2.50/ hour because it
| would "distort" the local labor markets makes 0 sense. It's
| brutal work and underpaying for it by outsourcing the jobs
| to poorer places is a way of hiding true costs, much like
| how we ship our trash to other countries so we can feel
| better about "recycling" when they throw it away.
| jsnell wrote:
| Unless I'm misreading the article, this office is dealing
| with moderating content from sub-Saharan Africa, not
| dealing with "our trash". It is not that jobs are being
| outsourced to where they are cheapest, these jobs
| fundamentally have to be located somewhere in the region.
| You just couldn't hire enough people with the right
| language skills for this kind of work in the US.
| FabHK wrote:
| Required language skills (in several African languages)
| were mentioned in the article, so that's not implausible.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There is philosophical mismatch here.
|
| To me, if you can get qualified workers for $2/hour,
| that's all you should pay. End of discussion.
|
| If people accept the job offers, you are, by definition,
| not underpaying. It clearly helps the local economy,
| lifts people somewhat out of poverty, and is a classic
| win-win situation.
| toqy wrote:
| Exactly, if you aren't willing to exploit Africans what
| are you even doing?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Looks like you need to read the HN commenting guidelines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| toqy wrote:
| I've read them and found no issues. Thanks for your
| concern.
| Proven wrote:
| Kalium wrote:
| > Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more
| than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in
| a horrible environment.
|
| Not precisely, but a person's choices should generally be
| considered in light of the alternatives reasonably available
| to them. If nothing else, it's often a great way to better
| understand the choices people make. Not every person has
| fast, easy, low-risk access to a six-figure USD SWE job with
| a YCombinator startup.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yes but when you laser focus on this fact above all overs,
| as someone always does when they come up on HN, you are
| positioning yourself more as "sweatshop apologist" than
| "global labor market understander."
| Kalium wrote:
| I would go so far as to suggest that the article is
| framed in a way designed to divide people into "Facebook
| haters and/or defenders of the exploited" and "sweatshop
| apologist" camps. Generally this has the side effect of
| making it difficult to be a global labor market
| understander.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Something a company chooses to do is in fact about that
| company, even if they didn't create the pressure to do it or
| invent the practice, even if other people do it more or did it
| first, etc etc. They teach this in kindergarten so I know you
| know it. If Alex jumped off a bridge, that thing.
|
| > It critiques working conditions without providing any context
| as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely
| even average pay- jobs in those countries.
|
| What context could justify the _global_ power imbalance that
| makes this economic relationship possible? The article is
| _critiquing working conditions and power imbalances_. I 'm
| sorry it also doesn't take the time to explain and rationalize
| the economic injustice that created them.
|
| You seem to using a liberal or neoliberal framework to
| understand this relation in terms of its individual actors and
| the economic incentives and consequences of them. The missing
| context here isn't more details about those actors and
| consequences, it's an exploration of why these factors are
| distributed the way they are and how to engage with that
| system.
| wdb wrote:
| I am wondering if the leadership of Facebook ever was doing this
| work? Maybe they should do all kind of roles within their company
| for at least a two days a year. So they get a feel what's going
| on the work floor
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