Inside Facebook’s Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where ‘Camel Toes’ are More Offensive Than ‘Crushed Heads’
http://gawker.com/5885714/
Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, is pissed at Facebook. Last year he spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid a measly $1 an hour. He’s still fuming over it.
“It’s humiliating. They are just exploiting the third world,” Derkaoui complained in a thick French accent over Skype just a few weeks after Facebook filed their record $100 billion IPO. As a sort of payback, Derkaoui gave us some internal documents, which shed light on exactly how Facebook censors the dark content it doesn’t want you to see, and the people whose job it is to make sure you don’t.
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These censorship scandals haven’t been helped by Facebook’s opacity regarding its content moderation process. Whenever Facebook deletes an image it deems objectionable, it refers the offending user to its rambling Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. That policy is vague when it comes to content moderation, and probably intentionally so. If users knew exactly what criteria was being used to judge their content, they could hold Facebook to them. It would be clear what Facebook was choosing to censor according to its policies, and what amounted to arbitrary censorship.
Well, now we know Facebook’s exact standards. (much more at link)
Here’s the cheat sheet:
Full document is in the article (has a few slightly NWS thumbnails).
As the article points out, certain policies were made to keep in line with international law — Holocaust denial is outlawed in several European countries, for instance, and moderators are told to “escalate” reports on it.
The other issue is, there’s something of a mental toll on the moderators, because they’re not all Internet tough guys like us who’ve gazed into the abyss of a man’s gaping anus without flinching.
quote:
Derkaoui found his job through the California-based outsourcing firm oDesk, which provides content moderation services to both Google and Facebook. After acing a written test and an interview, he was invited to join an oDesk team of about 50 people from all over the third world—Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, India—working to moderate Facebook content. They work from home in 4-hour shifts and earn $1 per hour plus commissions (which, according to the job listing, should add up to a “target” rate of around $4 per hour).
The job posting made no mention of Facebook, and Derkaoui said his managers at oDesk never explicitly said that it was the client. Facebook is secretive about how it moderates content; the company is hesitant to bring attention to the torrent of horrible content it’s trying to control. Other former moderators I spoke to mentioned that they had signed strict non-disclosure agreements with oDesk. One even refused to talk to me because she believed I was a disguised Facebook employee trying to test her.
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Like Derkaoui, most agreed that the pay sucked, while also acknowledging that it was typical of the sort of work available on oDesk. Derkaoui was the only one who cited money as a reason for quitting. The others seemed more affected by the hours they’d spent wading in the dark side of Facebook.
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Each moderator seemed to find a different genre of offensive content especially jarring. One was shaken by videos of animal abuse. (“A couple a day,” he said.) For another, it was the racism: “You had KKK cropping up everywhere.” Another complained of violent videos of “bad fights, a man beating another.”
One moderator only lasted three weeks before he had to quit.
“Pedophelia, Necrophelia, Beheadings, Suicides, etc,” he recalled. “I left [because] I value my mental sanity.”
Some firms have recognized the mental toll of content moderation and have begun providing psychological counseling to workers. But former moderators said oDesk just warned them that the job would be graphic.
“They did mention that the job was not for the light of heart before hiring me,” said the moderator who quit after three weeks. “I think it’s ultimately my fault for underestimating JUST how disturbing it’d be.”
While it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of horrid shit posted to Facebook, the thought that it gets dumped in the lap of some poor guy in Mexico or India like so much pollution is pretty awful. I mean, some American college student probably wouldn’t bat an eye if he moderated for summer cash, but then that would eat into Facebook’s margins.
