Content moderation is what a 21st century hazardous job looks like
Content moderation is what a 21st century hazardous job looks like
“There are surely some content moderators that haven't suffered mental health problems connected to the job, but I haven't met them,” says sociologist and computer scientist Milagros Miceli, who has studied the content moderation industry for the past six years. “I have no doubt that content moderat...
are lemmy mods already seeing this type of stuff regularly or are we too small just yet?
No, they are. There was a spam wave some time ago that had people upload gore and other things onto instances.
Done that for almost 3 years it wasn’t so bad because bots catch the really bad stuff but like 10 years ago or so it was really bad…
“If something you see is really difficult then you can leave your desk, but at that moment you have to remember to put on your computer that you are on ‘wellbeing’,” explains Eyvazzadeh. “But if the supervisors think you are using wellbeing more than you should, they will intervene. They would say: ‘Your ‘production’ time is a bit lower than expected, you have been on wellbeing a lot.’ So you are pressured to increase your time on ‘production’ by decreasing your ‘wellbeing.’”
It’s bad enough we make overseas workers spend all day pulling the lever of a slot machine that yields mis-flagged puppy videos and gruesome beheadings with equal likelihood, but then we stack NDAs, legal obstacles, surveillance, and KPI admonishment on top of it.
If you wrote this in a sci-fi novel, your editor would say “that’s a little cartoonishly evil, isn’t it?”
Edit: Oh, health privacy violations and union-busting too. Classy stuff!
I tried being a moderator on a forum once, and after alerting admins and the FBI about csam less than a week in, I decided I was done being a moderator.
It was a forum for RC stuff, mostly diy rc planes.
Unfortunately, therapy only helps you cope, it doesn't let you forget.
Jesus Christ. On an RC website?! I just don't even know how to process that. That doesn't make any sense.
So sorry you had to see that.
The internet was simultaneously the best and worst thing for humanity.
Browsers with a GUI was a mistake. We should have stayed with CLI tools: telnet, ftp, and Lynx if you really want to read a web site.
Let me know how many content moderators contract hep-C through the screen.
So, are you one of the "mental healthcare isn't real healthcare" people, or are you just butthurt and unable to be objective because some mod banned you one time?
Mental healthcare is one of the most neglected forms of care in current modern western society. It IS and always HAS BEEN a serious and damaging form of disease.
What it isn't is comparable to black lung or COPD in content moderation teams. The exaggeration by hacks like Miceli, to justify her grift and the continued funneling of grants towards her dubious work at TUB does more disservice for the cause than helps. It creates a situation of Peter and the Wolf and makes access to care extremely complicated to people who are suffering from mental illness, with severe social and personal consequences.