The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge

a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos... people develop severe anxiety in training... struggle with trauma long after they leave... conspiracy videos ... gradually lead them to embrace fringe views...

By the end of 2018... more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content moderators...

challenges include the sheer volume ... train... low-paid workers to consistently apply a single set of rules; near-daily changes and clarifications to those rules; a lack of cultural or political context on the part of the moderators; missing context in posts ... frequent disagreements among moderators ...

less than 30 seconds on each item... up to 400 times a day... a “subject matter expert... more comprehensive knowledge of Facebook’s policies makes $1 more per hour ... Accuracy is only judged by agreement. If me and the auditor both allow the obvious sale of heroin, Cognizant was ‘correct'...

for any given policy enforcement decision, they have several sources of truth to consider... Facebook’s public community guidelines consist of publicly posted ones and longer internal guidelines... [plus] 15,000-word document called “Known Questions,”... incremental guidance about developing issues is distributed on a near-daily basis... At times, it feels as if Facebook’s own product is working against them...

the call center model for content moderation... entrusts essential questions of speech and safety to people who are paid as if they were handling customer service calls for Best Buy.