By comparison, the average Facebook employee has a total compensation of $240,000, according to Newton's reporting. Moderators in Phoenix will make just $28,800 per year. Topping the list: Raise the salary of moderators.Ĭurrently, Newton noted, moderators at Cognizant are earning about $4 above the state's minimum wage. Newton said he's glad to hear that Facebook is taking these issues seriously, but he has suggestions for steps he thinks the company should take. We know there are going to be incidents of employee challenges or dissatisfaction that call our commitment into question, which is why we are taking steps to be extremely transparent about the expectations we have of our partners," the statement said.Īll Tech Considered From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg "We work with our partners to ensure they provide competitive compensation starting at $15 per hour, benefits, and a high level of support for their employees. In a statement to NPR about Newton's story, Facebook spokesperson Carolyn Glanville said the company is committed to getting "such an important issue" right. Some told Newton that they knew their changing beliefs were actually false, he said, "but they just kept telling me these videos are so persuasive and we see them all the time." I talked to someone else who said they had begun to question the reality of the Holocaust." "I spoke to one man who told me that he no longer believes that 9/11 was a terrorist attack. "The longer they looked at the kind of fringe conspiracies that get posted onto Facebook, the more they found themselves sympathetic to those ideas," he said. Perhaps the most surprising find from his investigation, the reporter said, was how the majority of the employees he talked to started to believe some of the conspiracy theories they reviewed. The longer they looked at the kind of fringe conspiracies that get posted onto Facebook, the more they found themselves sympathetic to those ideas "And if a moderator makes the wrong call more than a handful of times during the week, their job could be at risk." "Every piece of content that gets reported on Facebook needs to be evaluated by a moderator to see if it breaks the rules or not," Newton said. As Newton cites in his story, that number is just short of half of the 30,000-plus employees Facebook hired by the end of 2018 to work on safety and security. Worldwide, 15,000 moderators contracted by the company spend their workday wading through racism, conspiracy theories and violence. One way Facebook has responded is by hiring a small army of mostly contract labor to manage the abundance of flagged content. At the same time, it has also been accused of wielding too heavy a hand in censoring free speech. Non-disclosure agreements, drawn up to protect employees from users who might be angry about a content decision, prevent the employees from talking about their work, according to Newton.ĭespite continued promises from Facebook leadership to prioritize safety on the platform, the company has come under scrutiny for its failure to curb the spread of propaganda, hate speech and other harmful content. In Newton's story, the moderators describe a low-paying, high-stress job with limited allowance to process the emotional toll of the work. In a recent article for The Verge titled "The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America," a dozen current and former employees of one of the company's contractors, Cognizant, talked to Newton about the mental health costs of spending hour after hour monitoring graphic content. (Facebook is a financial supporter of NPR.) "There are people in the world who spend a lot of time just sort of uploading the worst of humanity onto Facebook and Instagram," Casey Newton, the Silicon Valley editor for The Verge, said in an interview with NPR's Scott Simon.Īnd the moderators contracted by Facebook are on the front lines of this fight. Without the work of social media moderators, your timelines and news feeds would feel a lot darker. "Almost everyone I spoke with could vividly describe for me at least one thing they saw that continues to haunt them," he tells NPR's Scott Simon. The Verge's Casey Newton reported on the high-pressure work of Facebook content moderators.
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