# Online content moderation

I saw a panel discussion on this at [[MozFest]] 2019, and also watched The Cleaners documentary.

It's pretty grim stuff - both the distressing content that is created and uploaded around the world, and the way in which the people that are contracted to moderate this content are treated.


## Overview

-   the job of content moderation of big online platforms
    -   it is usually outsourced to other companies
    -   low paid employees do the act of moderation


## Who is setting the policies?

With their policies of what content is acceptable or not, the big tech firms are in some way determining what is acceptable to society. 

-   basically three/four private companies in the US
-   e.g. terrorist groups as designated by US homeland security are used as guidelines for content moderation
-   and they do it only based on on profit motives - e.g. reacting to bad publicity


## Conditions for workers


### Conditions

-   high level of things to see per day
    -   Chris Gray, who worked in Ireland as a content moderator, I think suggested around 600 items a day
        -   90% of it might be mundane, around 10% of it will be traumatic
        -   on The Cleaners documentary, I think they said in the Phillipines it's a target of around 20-25,000 every day??
-   monitoring
    -   workers are monitored to see if they are making 'correct' judgements
    -   have to meet a quality target otherwise their employment is in jeopardy
-   post traumatic stress
    -   stress of seeing disturbing things, stress of precarious labour, stress of having to determine what is good, what is bad


### Pay

-   at MozFest panel Cleaners directors said payment in the Phillipines is $1-$3 a day
-   Chris Gray said in Ireland around 12 euro a day I think?
-   contrast both of these with the salary of a Facebook engineer…
-   question: is it different types of content in different locations?


### Support

-   content moderators are under NDAs
    -   they can't talk about it with anyone, including friends/family
    -   talking about it would help with the trauma


## Use AI instead?

Why not use ML/AI to moderate this content?

-   AI can't handle the level of complexity involved in some of the decisions
-   dilemma: it would put people out of work - but it is unpleasant work
-   even for the unpleasant stuff, human input would be required to train any machine learning process anyway


## Legal action

-   currently a legal action being taken against Facebook by Chris Gray and others


## References

-   [[The Cleaners]] (film)
-   MozFest 2019 panel (probably will be online at some point)


## Misc

> The central problem is that Facebook has been charged with resolving philosophical conundrums despite being temperamentally ill-qualified and structurally unmotivated to do so.
> 
> -   [The Judgment of Paris | Lizzie O’Shea](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-judgment-of-paris-oshea)

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> If nudity can be artistic, exploitative, smutty, and empowering, then the depiction of violence can be about hate and accountability. A video of a shooting can be an expression of deadly bigotry, but it can also expose police wrongdoing. Distinguishing between them requires human decision-making, and resolving a range of contested ideas. **At present, private institutions bear significant responsibility for defining the boundaries of acceptability, and they are not very good at it.**
> 
> -   [The Judgment of Paris | Lizzie O’Shea](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-judgment-of-paris-oshea)