"Forced" is a weirdly charged word - like "garbage disposal workers forced to sign statement acknowledging that their work will involve handling garbage". What's the alternative here?
Yeah, it's awful, dirty work, and we should give them as much support as possible (definitely more support than they are getting right now) - but at the end of the day, "dealing with things most people don't want to touch" is literally the reason that the job exists...
TBH I'd be more concerned if YouTube was signing up moderators WITHOUT telling them that they're in for a life of emotional torture :/
Signing a nonnegotiable disclaimer, without full knowledge of impacts, under economic duress, under an extreme power and negotiation disadvantage, as a third-party contract employee, without collective bargaining, is not free and fully-informed consent.
What do you mean without full knowledge? This article is about adults being informed of the risks of PTSD up front.
Obviously everyone who seeks a job is under some form of "economic duress" for if they had no need for income they'd either not work, or work pro bono.
What's the alternative here? A YT moderators union isn't going to negotiate away the intrinsic shittiness of YT moderation.
There's informed and then there's informed. A few words in a disclaimer presented to you at the last moment is not anything like having full knowledge of the consequences. Long ago I did sysadmin work for an early anything-goes community site, bianca.com, which at the time involved a bunch of anti-abuse work. 20+ years later, there's still shit I can't unsee. Right now I can close my eyes and see my CRT, the room behind it, and the horrible things abusers were posting to make other people feel awful.
And what I had to deal with was a small fraction of the horror now flowing through the ugly parts of social media sites. I don't think written words alone can convey what people doing that work have to deal with, or the possible long-term impacts. At a minimum, for "fully informed" I'd suggest a one-hour documentary that mixes the kind of things they see with interviews from people who ended up with long-term trauma from the work.
And the alternative is what we've done with all sorts of other dangerous work: making it reasonably safe. Off the top of my head, I'd want to see: 1) tools that minimize exposure to harmful imagery (e.g., ML-driven auto-summarization and by-default pixelization), 2) weekly paid sessions with a therapist, 3) a limited amount of time per week dealing with the especially bad stuff, 4) significant, mandatory paid vacation, and 5) mandatory paid sabbaticals for anybody verging on burnout.
Occupationally, mental health isn't fundamentally different than physical health. Nobody reasonable today would deal with radiation or chemical exposure by just having people check the "I might get cancer and that's cool" box when they apply for a job, because we took the problem seriously. We need to do the same with toxic digital media.
Upfront, you mean other than those employees already working.
The more nefarious part of it is that at no point does Accenture suggest that they have any responsibility or will assist with said PTSD. Hell, they even imply that they'll most likely fire you if they find you do have it (one, because the document requires you to tell them, and two, because their supervisors repeatedly pressure therapists at the in house WeCare to disclose that information).
All the more reason to find work elsewhere which will cause those available to do the work be more scarce which will cause the compensation for the work to go up. For those under economic duress as it were, there's time. This isn't an imminent danger.
Nope. We should not sacrifice poor people on the altar of quarterly profit goals. Doubly so for companies like Google and Facebook, which are hugely profitable.
There is a sufficient supply of desperate and/or naive people that the market equilibrium is significant and lasting harm to humans. If companies won't solve that problem on their own, then the alternative is regulation. Given the history of physically dangerous jobs over the last century or so, I expect regulation is the likely outcome.
But these are not poor people. At $37k annually they are in the middle third of US income and substantially above the poverty level.
The article linked below profiles a man that "worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does". This indicates to me that all else being equal, they are already offering a premium.
Nor does it sound like he is either desperate or naive. He is well aware of market compensation and he is struggling to decide on the tradeoffs.
Oh? What's that relative to your income? Because my point isn't about absolute dollars. It's about America's long-running tendency toward exploitation of people with less money.
And two years later, they develop PTSD, and look for help with that, at which point Accenture waves this document saying they have absolutely zero responsibility to assist with it.
As someone with personal experience with PTSD, there's no such thing as being informed of the risks up front. No matter how bad it's described to be, it will be worse.
This is one reason I'm pro-UBI; while it might be reasonable to tightly couple subsistence to full-time labor while below a certain threshold of GDP, if our societal project is to maximize human dignity and autonomy (and why the hell not), truly consensual social relationships cannot exist at extremes of negotiation asymmetry, such as when survival / Maslow needs are reliant on employers and private capital.
Across some invisible line of total societal / planetary wealth, it becomes feasible to provide every human a baseline of economic and biological well-being; moreover, I would argue that such an economic ecosystem would be on net more generative than the "work to keep the wolves from the door" model:
- Economic anxiety decreases executive functioning and ability to plan for the future.
- Authoritarian labor models carry an "enforcement tax"; we can get more done if there's no need for a middle manager caste to enforce compliance and productivity (or the corresponding incentive for workers to "look busy").
- A great deal of real-world wealth creation isn't metered and carries no bargaining leverage, so goes unpaid / underpaid: raising children, community work, charities, FOSS
- As we continue to pluck low-hanging innovation fruit, we benefit from higher degrees of risk-taking. The more people who can afford to gamble on education and entrepreneurship, the more "hits" of unrealized value we'll discover (to say nothing of cultural and creative works).
In what way is working an unpleasant job that you could choose not to do slavery? Sounds to me like the person prefers the probability of PTSD to the guarantee of a life of poverty. How is that not informed consent? Because we wouldn't choose the same when living in a life of not-poverty? Are we really reducing all people without a certain level of income to children who can no longer make decisions for themselves or enter into contractual arrangements?
That's actually one of the main arguments against paid blood/plasma donation, and the major reason that we don't pay for organ donations, because it results in a society where the poor literally sell their own health for basic survival. Plasma is sufficiently replenishable and donationations are safe enough that the net gain of lives saved is considered worth the societal risks.
Plasma, or other readily replenished fluids (there's another popular option, at least for men, though it carries other pregnant long-term implications) are propbably reasonably fair. There's little long-term harm or consequence.
A kidney, lung, or liver lobe, not so much.
Psychological research or DNA submission enters a pretty freighted grey area.
Pretty much. If your choice is either "Do X or live in poverty," what do you choose? Keep in mind that poverty is often a trap that is very difficult to get out of.
Much of the theory I'd been supplied (mainstream economics, an unbeknownst to me at the time hardline Libertarian professor in my intro course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133958), was false.
Undoing the damage of false priors and models, especially under ongoing objection and denial based on those, is difficult and expensive in time, effort, and willpower.
The standard of consent that we apply in other areas would make it impossible for an individual, worker or customer, to ever enter into a contract with a larger corporation (exactly how large can be debated, but Google size with their Google size legal team is definitely beyond that point). I think it would be a good thing to standardize the law in this regard.
Alternatively, use it as continuous motivation to improve the relative position of the worker and consumer so they are closer to having the ability to give free and fully-informed consent.
What a bizarre thing to say. If reading about diets was enough then no one would ever be fat. But it turns out in the real world that reading about it and actually doing are very different. The same applies here.
You don't believe people sometimes do things because they would otherwise be forced to live in poverty? Because that's literally what "economic duress" means.
Maybe, but not in this case. Youtube reportedly pays moderators an annual salary of $37k [1] and Glassdoor reports the average content moderator salary is $45k. The US Health and Human Services put those salaries between 3 and 4 times that of the poverty guideline for a single person.
This poverty guideline describes the bottom 12% of the US population. The Youtube salary describes the middle 33%.
In the referenced Youtube article, the man "worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does". Not that he worries he will be "forced to live in poverty".
It seems to me that a youtube moderator has to moderate things ranging from a simple boob on screen to the most atrocious acts you can imagine.
Is like telling the garbage collector that picks up the thrash in your neighborhood to go to a melted reactor to pick up a bag because, hey, his/her job is to collect garbage. Would it be unfair treatment?
But aren't there ways to mitigate some of the issues of both? Might those ways incur costs to the company? Isn't the role of organized labor to advocate for the workers in areas where pure drive for profit would put workers lower priority?
The role of organized labor is to advocate for workers who want to organize. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that something must be wrong with a company simply because it doesn't have a union.
I didn't intend to say that something is wrong with a company if its employees are not unionized.
I did intend to say that a union can be an effective tool in advocating for employees to an organization that is driven to maximize profit.
For profit companies are often rewarded for minimizing costs. Certainly one can envision that FB might view moderation teams as an expense rather than strategic investment.
Organized labor can be a good counter balance to that.
I’m sorry but either you don’t know what you’re talking about here or have consumed some serious late-stage capitalism koolaid. This reporter has previously covered the experiences content moderators face in these types of jobs, and I suggest you read those articles.
Every day these moderators need to consume a rapid stream of horrifying videos depicting extreme forms of physical and sexual violence, in some cases involving children. In the FB moderator article they mentioned having to do so as fast as possible and with very few breaks. The employers provide pitiful mental health support, and unsurprisingly a lot of these workers develop serious PTSD and in some cases have committed suicide.
This is treatment that would normally be considered psychological torture, but because these people get paid (rather poorly at that) and signed some waiver then it’s “fair”? A lot of these people take these jobs because they’re desperate or don’t fully understand the consequences. I know that HN community is pro business, but I’m shocked at the callousness displayed by some of the comments here. A society that allows companies to pay desperate people to destroy their mental health is not a healthy one.
So just no one should do the job then? What’s your solution? Yeah they see horrible shit, that’s the job. There’s no way to do the job and NOT see horrible shit.
Should they get mental health care? Yes. Should they be treated better? Sure. Should they unionize? I’m all for it. But none of that stuff keeps them from handling garbage day in and day out. Because that’s the job.
For one, this is something existing employees are being told to sign. So they've been working at a job liable to give them PTSD for quite some time, and only now is the company acknowledging it... via a legal disclaimer they're forcing employees to sign.
> It also seeks to make employees responsible for monitoring changes in their mental health and orders them to disclose negative changes to their supervisor or HR representative.
Absolute abdication of responsibility. Doesn't exactly scream "fair treatment" to me.
It's a responsibility that should be abdicated. Would it be better if Google could force people to attend therapy because the company decided they're unwell?
If employment at Google were the direct cause of mental health issues, then, yes, Google should take responsibility. That responsibility should include providing mental health care, not forcing it upon anyone. Don't strawman the issue.
It would be better if every employee had a regular check in with a mental health professional. Google don’t need to decide anything. “Forced” makes it sound very authoritarian, but yes, requiring such checkups as a condition of employment would be a good thing.
I respect the consistency of your viewpoint, but mandating that all employees undergo a specific regimen of prophylactic mental health treatment would be incredibly unpopular and probably illegal.
How so? I believe that police officers need to do this after particularly bad encounters, for example. (In fact if you search for "police psychological interview" you'll find hundreds of pages and even YouTube videos showing "how to pass your police psychological exam.") So it's definitely not illegal, at least not across the board.
It is very much the nature of mental health that by the time you notice the deterioration you have already been possibly permanently harmed. What exactly will happen to someone who reports themselves as such to HR?
Let me repeat again for anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet: HR is not your friend.
Exactly why these employees should all be provided regular therapy sessions as part of their employment, regardless of whether they've noticed any issues.
> Employment law experts contacted by The Verge said Accenture’s requirement that employees tell their supervisor about negative changes to their mental health could be viewed as an illegal requirement to disclose a disability or medical condition to an employer.
> The Verge’s investigation last month into Accenture’s Austin site described hundreds of low-paid immigrants toiling in what the company calls its violent extremism queue, removing videos flagged for extreme violence and terrorist content. Working for $18.50 an hour, or about $37,000 a year, employees said they struggled to afford rent and were dealing with severe mental health struggles. The moment they quit Accenture or get fired, they lose access to all mental health services. One former moderator for Google said she was still experiencing symptoms of PTSD two years after leaving.
No formal educational credential. This category signifies that a formal credential issued by an educational institution, such as a high school diploma or postsecondary certificate, is not typically needed for entry into the occupation. Examples of occupations in this category include janitors and cleaners, cashiers, and agricultural equipment operators.
I didn't look to see if garbage workers specifically get higher salaries, but could be.
But even if that's the case, it doesn't seem like a very high salary, so, assuming that unions are not in a zero-sum game, and didn't need to cause other salaries to lower, this sounds like a benefit of unions. Or is it a drawback? I wasn't sure how your statement was taken.
It's more like. Hey you signed up for this little known and fancy "Moderator" position, no prior experience required, before you start, let us explain what it's actually about.
Some other comments mentioned that existing employees are required to sign the waiver to continue employment. To me that's more justifying of the word forced, because of the threat of losing your job.
And how do you force someone to do something? It's generally by threatening them of some consequence they dread or can't afford. Losing your job sounds like it qualifies to me.
Another thing I want to bring to the debate is that opportunity does matter. It may not be YouTube that is forcing them to work under such conditions, but our society at large. We set standards which create the alternative choices. If we offered better means of making a living to people, they wouldn't agree to such conditions. So this social aspect is really important. We need to all uphold standards of respect and dignity for ourselves and others. This is really important, because those standards define the selection of choices that you are free to choose from.
A disclaimer that says they could be fired for disclosing disabilities (illegal), and that says nothing about Accenture assisting with their PTSD (beyond WeCare, which has already been flagged for many problems, including inability to access at work, and Accenture/Facebook supervisors pressuring counselors for visit summaries or patient care notes), and obligates the employee to find their _own_ mental health care because of work issues, at their own cost.
And being pressured to sign the voluntary form or risk being fired.
That sounds like you believe YouTube hosting appalling, extreme content is just a fact of life and there's nothing that can be done about it. That's a sad testament about Google engineers if it's true.
If Google could do something about this problem and are choosing not to then a better analogy would be garbage collectors signing something to accept they have to handle anthrax, and you saying "well, they don't have to be garbage collectors!"
I’m personally more interested in societal impacts to it.
YouTube is an impactful media, and it is moderated by personal judgements of, low paid, unqualified “moderators”, who may or may not have PTSD warping judgements or has political or religious inclinations.
I remember there was a news story of a Facebook moderator whose PTSD caused them to flag a legitimate family photo as a child pornography. I don’t think there is any other interpretation to it than that repeated exposure to images to flag will lead to the standards within the moderator to rise towards infinity sooner or later, beyond logic.
This is a slow fire burning the library of Alexandria that is the Internet, because everything WILL be labeled as “hateful offensive violent pornography” or something, past which point only static noises remain.
Garbage collectors have always existed. That's not true for shocking videos. Youtube and other social networks need to be held accountable for creating the incentive to produce such content in the first place. The impact on their own employees is only the first sliver of harm they are enabling.
The "incentive" to produce most shocking content is mostly due to the video sharing websites being free and open; even if there were no recommendations or subscriber feeds on YouTube, they would need this content moderation job since the same people would be uploading the same stuff.
When you are working and the company wants you to sign something to keep working it is different than if you are looking for work and the company says before you can work here you have to sign this.
Do garbage collectors in the US still empty the cans manually instead of using robotic arms for that? Or is there something else particularly harmful about the job I don't know about?
And those unionized workers usually have pretty great benefits, pay, and pensions that they've bargained for because of that.
If their back goes out, the insurance and/or company will have to foot the bill. If the company fails to provide adequate training and safety precautions [within reason] they're highly liable.
This sounds a little like YT is attempting to abdicate responsibility, rather than coming to an agreement.
All of that said, I have no insight into the onboarding practices for a job like this one. Are they trained not only in how to moderate, but how to recognize signs of work-related stress or mental issues ahead of time and given reasonable precautions against causing long-term damage? Are they thoughtfully prepared for some of the content they will have to view? I guess I could look this up myself, but I'm also wondering if anyone here has that kind of insight.
> Yeah, it's awful, dirty work, and we should give them as much support as possible
Have you ever moderated anything? I don't see how a one sided content moderation can invoke much emotions, like even talking on HN to others is more of an "emotional torture" than such moderation. The problem with moderation is probably more about overloading people, forcing them to keep focus all day long.
I think it's about detachment. I consume a lot of dissection, postmortem, surgical, etc content.
As long as I can surpress thinking it was a real person, I can watch it without any problem.
After many videos, it becomes automatic. Desensitisation is a real problem with watching things from a screen.
But key factor is control, I know what I am going to watch and I can control whether if I want to. Those people on moderation team may not have such situation.
OP is grossly misunderstanding about the long term cost, though. Short term reactions differ from person to person. Some people can quickly associate real things from a video while others don't. It's akin how people can become too mean and insult others online without feeling bad about it.
But things still float around in your head even if you didn't have an immediate reaction. You would remember it some time later or have dreams about it. It will be horrible.
Meh, western entertainment is already full of violence, torture, and murder. People get pretty good stomaching that, and I don't think it's very different if a video is real. As long as it's all happening away from you, people you don't know, events that don't affect you, it might as well be fiction.
Here's what I think is happening: megacorps want to overwork people into the ground, but pretend that it's disturbing content that's causing it, not them forcing people to keep focused and assessing content all day long.
I moderated millions of images myself, plenty of disturbing images, but for my own project and this is why it sounds like bullshit to me.
Here's a thought. Maybe it's both, first off. The shit hours and disturbing content.
Also, your sample of experience, n=1, is not great. And genuinely, if you can look at child porn, murder, and other awful, genuinely terrible things all day, every day, and not be impacted, you 100% need to speak to a therapist. That is not the normal human response to trauma.
> And genuinely, if you can look at child porn, murder, and other awful, genuinely terrible things all day, every day, and not be impacted
Well, that's not what moderation is. Most of it is not actually disturbing content. And when you are moderating it, you don't know what kind of content you are looking at, until you get to the point that you do, but that's the point where you have to block it and move on to the next thing. There is not much possibility for emotions. But it is very mentally exhausting work.
Honestly speaking, whether it be videos of extreme content or fluffy rabbits. I will feel absolutely terrible after a few hours of having to watch it. I can't imagine doing that for months.
Yeah, it's awful, dirty work, and we should give them as much support as possible (definitely more support than they are getting right now) - but at the end of the day, "dealing with things most people don't want to touch" is literally the reason that the job exists...
TBH I'd be more concerned if YouTube was signing up moderators WITHOUT telling them that they're in for a life of emotional torture :/