#status/processed :format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/14462233/jchou_190222_3252_facebook_0023.jpg) # Metadata Author:: [[theverge.com]] Title:: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America Full Title:: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America Import Date:: 2023-05-13 Source:: #source/readwise/instapaper Source URL:: [Source URL](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) Review URL:: [Review URL](https://readwise.io/bookreview/26339309) # Document Tags:: [[Facebook]] [[Social Commentary]] [[Social Media]] # Highlights - No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do. - Date:: [[2019-03-09]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10373277) - ==Employees have begun to embrace the fringe viewpoints of the videos and memes that they are supposed to moderate.== The Phoenix site is home to a [[flat Earther]] and a [[Holocaust denier]]. - Date:: [[2019-03-09]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10373284) - Tags: [[Stockholm Syndrome]] - And while [[Zuckerberg]] had warned investors that Facebook’s investment in security would reduce the company’s profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year. - Date:: [[2019-03-09]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10373285) - But while employees at [[Facebook]]’s Menlo Park headquarters work in an airy, sunlit complex designed by Frank Gehry, ==its contractors in Arizona labor in an often cramped space where long lines for the few available bathroom stalls can take up most of employees’ limited break time.== - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10376964) - Tags: [[Tech Inequality]] - When he is ready to work, he clicks a button labeled “resume reviewing,” and dives into the queue of posts. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10376972) - Accuracy, in this case, means that when Facebook audits a subset of contractors’ decisions, its full-time employees agree with the contractors. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10376975) - ([[Thomas Jefferson]] was ultimately granted a posthumous exemption to Facebook’s speech guidelines, which prohibit the use of the phrase “Indian savages.”) - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10376988) - Note: Technology has allowed us to imprint in the collective memory anything and everything from the good to the bad, and this means the platforms of tomorrow will have to deal with shifting cultural circumstances and avoid being perceived as hypocritical in the process. - At times, it feels as if Facebook’s own product is working against them. The irony is not lost on the moderators. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10376996) - But every moderator I asked about this said that ==[[Cognizant]] managers discourage employees from raising issues to the client, apparently out of fear that too many questions would annoy Facebook.== - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377005) - Note: Treating your frontline personell poorly is equivalent to treating your customers and the public poorly. - Tags: [[Consulting]] - Miguel is also allotted ==nine minutes per day of “wellness time,”== which he is supposed to use if he feels traumatized and needs to step away from his desk. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377012) - “If you’re not allowed to talk to your friends or family about your job, that’s going to create some distance. You might feel closer to these people. It feels like an emotional connection, when in reality you’re just [[trauma bonding]].” - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377014) - “We were doing something that was darkening our soul - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377030) - The victim had been about his age, and he remembers hearing the man crying for his mother as he died. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377044) - The day before I arrived at the office park where Cognizant resides, one source tells me, new motivational posters were hung up on the walls. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377048) - Facebook takes pride in the fact that it pays contractors at least 20 percent above minimum wage at all of its content review sites, provides full healthcare benefits, and offers mental health resources that far exceed that of the larger call center industry. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377055) - Beyond cost savings, the benefit of [[Outsourcing]] is that it allows tech companies to rapidly expand their services into new markets and languages. ==But it also entrusts essential questions of speech and safety to people who are paid as if they were handling customer service calls for Best Buy.== - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377058) - Note: Outsourcing high risk decisions - That people don’t know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377062) - They do the work as long as they can — and when they leave, an NDA ensures that they retreat even further into the shadows. - Date:: [[2019-03-10]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1170279986/10377064)