The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
by Casey Newton for TheVerge, on 25th feb 2019
►https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-
The job resembles a high-stakes video game in which you start out with 100 points — a perfect accuracy score — and then scratch and claw to keep as many of those points as you can. Because once you fall below 95, your job is at risk.
Fearing for his safety, Randy began bringing a concealed gun to work. Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues, and Randy believed that some of them were serious. A former coworker told me she was aware that Randy brought a gun to work, and approved of it, fearing on-site security would not be sufficient in the case of an attack.
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. Several moderators told me that they routinely used their wellness time to go to the restroom when lines were shorter. But management eventually realized what they were doing, and ordered employees not to use wellness time to relieve themselves
At the Phoenix site, Muslim workers who used wellness time to perform one of their five daily prayers were told to stop the practice and do it on their other break time instead
Cognizant employees are told to cope with the stress of the jobs by visiting counselors, when they are available; by calling a hotline; and by using an employee assistance program, which offers a handful of therapy sessions.
They [6 employees] told me they coped with the stress of the job in other ways: with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes.
“You get really close to your coworkers really quickly,” she says. “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."
As an ethnic minority, Li was a frequent target of his coworkers, and he embraced what he saw as good-natured racist jokes at his expense, he says.
After the Parkland shooting last year, moderators were initially horrified by the attacks. But as more conspiracy content was posted to Facebook and Instagram, some of Chloe’s colleagues began expressing doubts [...] "People started Googling things instead of doing their jobs and looking into conspiracy theories about them. We were like, ‘Guys, no, this is the crazy stuff we’re supposed to be moderating. What are you doing?’”
“A lot of people don’t actually make it through the training,” she says. “They go through those four weeks and then they get fired. They could have had that same experience that I did, and had absolutely no access to counselors after that.”
“There was nothing that they [the counselors] were doing for us,” Li says, “other than expecting us to be able to identify when we’re broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating — they don’t even see it. "
Last week, after I told Facebook about my conversations with moderators, the company invited me to Phoenix to see the site for myself. [...] 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. [...] After meetings with executives from Cognizant and Facebook, I interview five workers who had volunteered to speak with me. They stream into a conference room, along with the man who is responsible for running the site. With their boss sitting at their side, employees acknowledge the challenges of the job but tell me they feel safe, supported, and believe the job will lead to better-paying opportunities — within Cognizant, if not Facebook.
They [two counselors includong the doctor who set up on-site counseling] tell me that they check in with every employee every day. They say that the combination of on-site services, a hotline, and an employee assistance program are sufficient to protect workers’ well-being.
“If we weren’t there doing that job, Facebook would be so ugly,” Li says. “We’re seeing all that stuff on their behalf. And hell yeah, we make some wrong calls. But people don’t know that there’s actually human beings behind those seats.”
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.
They [moderators] do the work as long as they can — and when they leave, an NDA ensures that they retreat even further into the shadows.
To Facebook, it will seem as if they never worked there at all. Technically, they never did.