Before Demanding Internet Companies 'Hire More Moderators,' Perhaps We Should Look At How Awful The Job Is

from the sacrificial-lambs dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about a powerful piece by Casey Newton at The Verge detailing what a horrific job it is to be a content moderator for Facebook. It was eye-opening.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

While it was a powerful and wonderfully written piece, as we noted in February, this wasn't new to people following the space closely. There had been previous academic papers, a documentary, and even a big guest post here at Techdirt that highlighted some of the working conditions concerns of those in content moderation jobs.

Well, now, Newton is back with another powerful and heartbreaking story of more (former) Facebook moderators revealing the truly awful working conditions they faced. It opens with the story of a content moderator who died on the job of a heart attack at 42 years of age. And then discusses details revealed by many more content moderators, all of whom broke NDAs they signed to tell this story (good for them in doing so -- such NDAs should not be allowed):

More than anything else, the contractors described an environment in which they are never allowed to forget how quickly they can be replaced. It is a place where even Keith Utley, who died working alongside them, would receive no workplace memorial — only a passing mention during team huddles in the days after he passed. “There is no indication that this medical condition was work related,” Cognizant told me in a statement. “Our associate’s colleagues, managers and our client were all saddened by this tragic event.” (The client is Facebook.)

There are all sorts of reasonable responses to this -- many of which should be feeling horrified. Horrified that Facebook doesn't have better control over these outside contracting firms it hires to staff its content moderation team. Horrified that Facebook is even outsourcing this stuff in the first place. Horrified at the sweatshop like setup of the content moderation efforts.

Marcus was made to moderate Facebook content — an additional responsibility he says he was not prepared for. A military veteran, he had become desensitized to seeing violence against people, he told me. But on his second day of moderation duty, he had to watch a video of a man slaughtering puppies with a baseball bat. Marcus went home on his lunch break, held his dog in his arms, and cried. I should quit, he thought to himself, but I know there’s people at the site that need me. He ultimately stayed for a little over a year.

Cognizant calls the part of the building where contractors do their work “the production floor,” and it quickly filled with employees. The minimum wage in Florida is $8.46, and at $15 an hour, the job pays better than most call center work in the area. For many content moderators — Cognizant refers to them by the enigmatic title of “process executive” — it was their first real job.

In its haste to fill the workplace, Cognizant made some odd staffing decisions. Early on, the company hired Gignesh Movalia, a former investment advisor, as a moderator. Cognizant conducts background checks on new hires, but apparently failed even to run a basic web search on Movalia. Had they done so, they would have learned that in 2015 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his involvement in a $9 million investment fraud scheme. According to the FBI, Movalia had falsely claimed to have access to shares of a fast-growing technology startup about to begin trading on the public market.

The startup was Facebook.

But part of the blame has to go back to everyone demanding that these companies must be the arbiters of truth and what's okay and not okay online. Remember, just a couple months ago, a lot of people were totally up in arms over the fact that Facebook (and YouTube and Twitter) didn't automagically delete anything having to do with the Christchurch shooting, as if it was easy to snap your fingers and get rid of all that content. The only way to do it is to hire a ton of people and subject them to absolutely horrific content over and over and over again. Just to keep everyone else pure.

That, of course, is unrelated to the horrible working conditions within these facilities. The two things need not go hand in hand -- and there's no reason why Facebook can't create or demand better overall working conditions for content moderators it employs or contracts out to. However, the insane demand that social media platforms somehow be perfect, and how every error is held up as some sort of moral failing by the companies, means that these companies are simply pressured to hire more and more and more rapidly -- leading to these kinds of crazy awful situations like the ones Newton describes in his article.

The result is a raucous workplace where managers send regular emails to the staff complaining about their behavior on the site. Nearly every person I interviewed independently compared the Tampa office to a high school. Loud altercations, often over workplace romances, regularly take place between co-workers. Verbal and physical fights break out on a monthly basis, employees told me. A dress code was instituted to discourage employees from wearing provocative clothing to work — “This is not a night club,” read an email to all employees obtained by The Verge. Another email warned employees that there had been “numerous incidents of theft” on the property, including stolen food from the office refrigerator, food from vending machines, and employees’ personal items.

Michelle Bennetti and Melynda Johnson both began working at the Tampa site in June 2018. They told me that the daily difficulty of moderating content, combined with a chaotic office environment, made life miserable.

“At first it didn’t bother me — but after a while, it started taking a toll,” Bennetti told me. “I got to feel, like, a cloud — a darkness — over me. I started being depressed. I’m a very happy, outgoing person, and I was [becoming] withdrawn. My anxiety went up. It was hard to get through it every day. It started affecting my home life.”

Both of these things can be true:

1. Facebook should do a much better job with the working conditions for its moderators... and
2. Continually demanding that Facebook (and others) somehow present only a perfect, squeaky clean internet is creating incentives for this rapid and chaotic hiring spree that creates more and more problems.

The worse, however, are people who both keep demanding that Facebook "do more" and then who also attack the company for these practices, as if the two things are not related. If we want the big internet companies to be these online morality police, that's one thing. But if that's going to be the case, then we need to have a much bigger and much more open discussion on what that means, who is involved, and how it will all work. Because if protecting "the public" from "bad" content online means subjecting tens of thousands of low-waged workers to that content all day, every day, we should at least consider if that's a reasonable and acceptable trade-off.

Employees told me about other disturbing incidents at the Tampa site. Among them:

• An employee who used a colostomy bag had it rupture while she was at work, spilling some waste onto the floor. Senior managers were overheard mocking her. She eventually quit.
• An employee who threatened to “shoot up the building” in a group chat was placed on paid leave and allowed to return. He was fired after making another similar threat. (A Cognizant spokesperson said the company has security personnel on site at all hours. “Our goal is to ensure that our employees feel assured that they work in a safe environment,” he said.)
• Another employee broadcast himself on Facebook Live talking about wanting to bash a manager’s head in. Another manager determined that he was making a joke, and he was not disciplined.

Yes, almost everything in the article is horrific. And, yes, we should all demand that Facebook do a better job. But that's just treating the symptoms and not the larger cause behind this. We can't keep brushing all of this under the rug by covering it up with a "well, the platforms need to do better." If you're demanding that the internet services protect you from "bad content," we should have a much more open discussion about what that means, and what it will mean for the people doing the work.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, content moderators, outsourcing, working conditions
Companies: cognizant, facebook

Amazon Pays Employees To Chirp Happily On Twitter About Wonderful Working Conditions

from the disinformation-nation dept

For several years now, there have been a parade of articles examining the "churn and burn" culture at Amazon. For example a 2015 New York Times piece profiled the "bruising" culture at the company while noting that employees weeping at their desk was not an uncommon sight. And while the profile was contested by some employees at the company, a substantial number of different reports have also highlighted the poor working conditions in Amazon distribution warehouses, including employees having to pee in garbage cans for fear of missing targets by going to a proper restroom.

Hoping to correct the "public perception" of poor working conditions at the company's warehouses, Amazon executives have crafted a new "solution" to the problem. They've started paying some warehouse employees to create Twitter accounts and speak positively of not only their working experiences, but CEO Jeff Bezos. Under the tags of "Amazon FC Ambassadors," these employees are broadly encouraged to respond to any criticism of Amazon with positivity and, apparently, copious use of emojis as they proudly insist they can pee any time they'd like:

Amazon is a little bit dodgy in comments to The Guardian when it comes to admitting that these employees are being paid extra to chirp happily about their wonderful working experiences at Amazon:

"An Amazon spokesman, Ty Rogers, assured the Guardian via email that these ambassadors were real employees who work in fulfillment centers, not Twitter bots. He declined to answer questions about how the accounts were created or if employees were compensated for defending the company on social media.

“FC ambassadors are employees who understand what it’s actually like to work in our FCs,” says Rogers. “The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience. It’s important that we do a good job of educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that, along with the FC tours we provide."

The employees are similarly cagey about whether they're being paid extra to speak positively about the company on Twitter:

"Asked specifically about whether they were paid extra for their Twitter service, Leo, from Jacksonville, replied: “this is just another role that I have. Right now I’m tweeting from work."

In other words, yes, your employer is paying you extra to say nice things about it. You'd hope that actual improvements to working conditions have accompanied Amazon's apparent belief that this campaign of mandatory enthusiasm was a good idea.

Filed Under: ambassadors, astroturf, social media, warehouses, working conditions
Companies: amazon

Storytelling, Truth And Consequences

from the not-everything-is-just-a-story dept

I really like telling stories. Quite a bit. At times, my friends will make fun of me for this, because if there's an opportunity when hanging out to tell a story, I often can't resist. An old friend has referred to it as "uncle Mike's story time." My wife likes to joke about the stories I use often -- that these are "date stories" -- because I probably told her a bunch of them back when we were dating, and she assumes that I told them to others prior to her as well (that might be true). She numbers the most common ones (e.g., "date story 37") to highlight how frequently I use some of them.

Of course, as someone who likes to tell stories, I also love listening to stories -- both for the stories themselves, but also for the craft of storytelling. In the last few years, in particular, I've been listening to lots of podcasts that really focus on storytelling -- The Moth, This American Life, Snap Judgment, Radiolab. They're all fantastic. Of course, if you're just doing pure storytelling for the sake of amusing or entertaining people you're talking to... a certain amount of embellishment can happen. Hell, it can be common and almost expected. Not all my stories do that, but there are a few that would be just that much better if you change a little thing here or there. I once thought it might be fun to put a bunch of my usual stories (the "date stories" I guess) into a book, in which each story would include one exaggeration or outright falsehood -- and the final "chapter" would be to explore what was not quite true in each story, and why I used it (and if it was really necessary). I still think this would be fun to do if I ever actually had the time (I don't).

I've been thinking about this a bit following all of the controversy over This American Life's big retraction of the Mike Daisey episode, in which he used that storyteller's license to exaggerate key parts of the story about what he saw in China when he went to check out the Foxconn factories where Apple products are made. On Sunday, Daisey finally gave the apology he should have given a week ago, in which he admitted that he fabricated and exaggerated in the interest of the story, and that in doing so he didn't live up to his own standards.

But what's interested me even more is that I've seen a few different people call attention to the fact that others have called out This American Life in the past for supposed "true stories" that turned out to be anything but. Four years ago, for example, Jack Shaffer at Slate called out Malcolm Gladwell and TAL for a story that Gladwell did on TAL about his "experience" as a young reporter at The Washington Post (now the owner of Slate). That story was actually done for The Moth -- a regular storytelling event/group/thing, where the key thing is the story, not so much the truth. Almost exactly a year before that, there was a similar article in The New Republic, by Alex Heard, calling out TAL and contributor David Sedaris in a ridiculously long article highlighting a bunch of fact checks that suggest Sedaris' famed stories aren't always in the same time zone as the truth. There have also been other "memoir"-type stories on TAL that I would be willing to bet were similarly exaggerated.

Some have questioned why This American Life did a full hour episode on the Mike Daisey situation, but brushed off the criticism of Gladwell and Sedaris. And I think what it comes down to is exactly the reason it took Daisey so long to come to terms with why people were so upset about his story. Daisey comes from a tradition that is much closer to where Gladwell and Sedaris' stories came from: to entertain people, not to make a larger point. Daisey has been an active public storyteller for a decade or so (he's also active in The Moth). The problem was that with The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he went past storyteller into advocate.

He wasn't just trying to entertain. He was trying to make people "aware" and to make a difference. When you shift from one mode to the other, the rules change. And Daisey missed that.

The thing is, it's really not hard to separate the two. I don't tell exaggerated stories on Techdirt, in part because this isn't a "storytelling" forum, but also because this site depends on everything on it being as credible as possible. It's quite easy for me to understand the context and when the discussion is real and important, and when I'm just talking with some friends about a funny story. Similarly, I have no reason to doubt Gladwell's detailed research works (even if there are reasonable complaints about his occasional mistakes) include purposeful embellishments "for the story." Context matters and I think most people can separate them when talking about different subjects.

The issue with Diasey was that he took the storytelling tradition, and tried to make it out to be a "news" story in which he was really seeking to get things to happen. And that's where things fell down. If you're going to do that, your story has to check out. I'm not bothered by Gladwell or Sedaris' exaggerations (though I must admit to not finding Sedaris that entertaining -- but Gladwell's WaPo story is hilarious). If Daisey was just telling stories for the sake of storytelling, there wouldn't be an issue. But as soon as he made the story part of a campaign to create change, he had a responsibility to be factual. That he couldn't separate the two was a major mistake, and it's not even clear that his apology fully recognizes that fact.

Storytelling is a useful tool for entertainment. Storytelling can also be helpful in the interest of causing people to change behavior or to become aware of some real situations, but there are different standards that people expect in that kind of storytelling, and failing to live up to those ideals has serious consequences, as Daisey is starting to figure out now.

Filed Under: china, ira glass, journalism, mike daisey, monologue, production, rob schmitz, story telling, this american life, working conditions

This American Life Retracts Entire Episode About Apple Factories After Mike Daisey Admits To Fabricating Parts Of The Story

from the wow dept

This is pretty big. Last month, we wrote about a This American Life episode that focused on the Foxconn factories where Apple products are made, based on a one-man show by Mike Daisey. I wrote about a few key points in the episode -- including some of the more interesting claims from those who were used to "fact check" his story. Apparently, that fact check did not go nearly far enough. Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who is quite familiar with the factories in China, found large parts of the story questionable, and did some followup reporting, finding Daisey's translator and discovering that things Daisey said turned out not to be true. He then confronted Daisey with Ira Glass from TAL, and got Daisey to admit that he fabricated parts of the story, though he still appears to be in denial about how bad this looks:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

The problem, of course, is that it now appears that many of the things he was claiming weren't actually true of the plants he wrote about. There was one story that recounted events that did happen, but at a different plant 1,000 miles away, and which Daisey did not witness at all.

In the meantime, This American Life has retracted the entire show (link is down as of right now), and apparently plans to air a new show today that details what happened and has a detailed apology from Ira Glass (who just recently on the show was telling listeners to go see Daisey's full one man show).

It is true that Daisey is a storyteller, not a reporter, and that's fine in the right context. But once it got to the point that journalistic outfits were reporting on his story -- or even letting him repeat it on the air, he had every responsibility to be clear about the parts that were simply fabricated.

Filed Under: china, ira glass, mike daisey, monologue, production, rob schmitz, this american life, working conditions
Companies: apple, foxconn

ICE Considered One Of The Worst Places To Work In The Federal Government

from the maybe-if-they-spent-time-not-censoring-the-web dept

Last month, we noted the odd propaganda film from ICE director John Morton, in which he seemed to be trying to pat himself on the back and pump up the morale of ICE agents for their hard work in illegally censoring the internet. Perhaps it's because he knew that ICE agents apparently hate working there. An anonymous person pointed us to the news that in a recent ranking of government agencies, ICE ranked very near the bottom -- 222 out of 240 agencies. It seems that morale isn't particularly high there.

The same person pointed us to the news of a leaked memo from Morton concerning his disappointment about these rankings, and planning some sort of typical bureaucratic response to bad rankings: appointing someone to lead the effort to improve morale, looking at other agencies with happier employees and hosting some townhall meetings. Perhaps he could also try keeping ICE agents focused on issues related to their actual mandate, rather than having them work on seizing domain names and censoring the internet. Just a thought.

Filed Under: ice, john morton, morale, working conditions