<story><title>Open Letter from Facebook Content Moderators</title><url>https://www.foxglove.org.uk/news/open-letter-from-content-moderators-re-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve long thought this could be a competitive advantage for people to do &amp;quot;rotations&amp;quot; on different roles. Building tools for moderators? Do a week moderating. Building tools for salespeople? Do a week as a salesperson. You&amp;#x27;re a salesperson who needs tools built for you? Do a week on the dev team.</text></item><item><author>zentiggr</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to see everyone in Facebook&amp;#x27;s chain of command above the moderators being required to do a week worth of the actual moderating.&lt;p&gt;Then let them say in public that they&amp;#x27;re doing their best for their employees.</text></item><item><author>monkin</author><text>&amp;gt; 5. Offer real healthcare and psychiatric care. Facebook employees enjoy various benefits, including private health insurance and visits to psychiatrists. Content moderators, who bear the brunt of the mental health trauma associated with Facebook’s toxic content, are offered 45 minutes a week with a ‘wellness coach’. These ‘coaches’ are generally not psychologists or psychiatrists and are contractually forbidden from diagnosis or treatment. And they generally cannot build a relationship of trust with moderators, since workers know that Facebook management (and Accenture&amp;#x2F;CPL management) ask ‘coaches’ to reveal confidential details of counselling sessions. Moderators deserve at least as much mental and physical health support as full Facebook staff.&lt;p&gt;Low pay and no psychiatric help with that kind of content?! This is just outrageous. Mark should moderate this stuff by himself to see how huge burden it is. And, this is not Rotten or Goatse type of shock it’s entirely different level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meekrohprocess</author><text>I once worked at a company that did something like that. It was optional, but once a year you could spend 3 days working in first-line customer service. A CS rep oversaw your responses, but you got an ordinary account in the customer service system and dealt with real customers.&lt;p&gt;The first two days you spent replying to customers, and the third day you spent prototyping or writing up some way that you thought common complaints could be addressed by making changes to the product.&lt;p&gt;It was a nearly unmitigated boon to the company. Sure, the company saw it as paying for a few extra vacation days. But the program stuck around because it generated a lot of good ideas, and the direct communication between CS and product development teams was valuable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Open Letter from Facebook Content Moderators</title><url>https://www.foxglove.org.uk/news/open-letter-from-content-moderators-re-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve long thought this could be a competitive advantage for people to do &amp;quot;rotations&amp;quot; on different roles. Building tools for moderators? Do a week moderating. Building tools for salespeople? Do a week as a salesperson. You&amp;#x27;re a salesperson who needs tools built for you? Do a week on the dev team.</text></item><item><author>zentiggr</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to see everyone in Facebook&amp;#x27;s chain of command above the moderators being required to do a week worth of the actual moderating.&lt;p&gt;Then let them say in public that they&amp;#x27;re doing their best for their employees.</text></item><item><author>monkin</author><text>&amp;gt; 5. Offer real healthcare and psychiatric care. Facebook employees enjoy various benefits, including private health insurance and visits to psychiatrists. Content moderators, who bear the brunt of the mental health trauma associated with Facebook’s toxic content, are offered 45 minutes a week with a ‘wellness coach’. These ‘coaches’ are generally not psychologists or psychiatrists and are contractually forbidden from diagnosis or treatment. And they generally cannot build a relationship of trust with moderators, since workers know that Facebook management (and Accenture&amp;#x2F;CPL management) ask ‘coaches’ to reveal confidential details of counselling sessions. Moderators deserve at least as much mental and physical health support as full Facebook staff.&lt;p&gt;Low pay and no psychiatric help with that kind of content?! This is just outrageous. Mark should moderate this stuff by himself to see how huge burden it is. And, this is not Rotten or Goatse type of shock it’s entirely different level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>Or at least shadowing if training for that role would be too much.  When I was at Netflix, I did a couple of hours of shadowing at our support center, and just that alone gave me a whole new sense of how I could improve our tools and processes to not only make their job easier, but also get the information we needed as reliability engineers.</text></comment>