Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog

Silicon Valley jokes that the bottom of the tech foodchain is kids that watch videos all day removing inappropriate content. Well this is the true story of who they are. The Verge published a quick look inside the life of a facebook content moderator… and it’s bananas… one employee describes it as “something that was darkening our soul”… about what you would expect from someone whose job it is to watch videos of actual murder and pornography all day. Employees (mostly in Phoenix) coping with the content they’re seeing by telling dark jokes, smoking lots of weed, drinking heavily, having sex in the nursing mother’s room, anxiety, trauma, lots of counseling and, inevitably, a lot of employee turnover. Disgruntled former employees threatened supervisors to the point that some started carrying concealed guns to work. It leaves you wondering if these poor underpaid kids are victims of labor code violations or unsung heroes of the internet, or both. After all, if it wasn’t for them, all of this crap would just be on Facebook for everyone else to see.

Apart from describing the terrible job, it discusses the challenge of what is and isn’t allowed. For instance, saying “my favorite n-----“ is allowed because it is “explicitly positive content” and even “autistic people should be sterilized” is fine because autism is not a protected class like race and gender. It’s actually a fascinating and incredibly challenging ethical dilemma that is particularly debatable when it comes to political issues such who should be a protected class. If you want a deeper dive into this, Joe Rogan hosted a combative and interesting debate on his podcast with Jack Dorsey and others about accusations of biased Twitter account bans.