<story><title>Facebook&apos;s African Sweatshop</title><url>https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatment/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>burpee</author><text>I interviewed a young man who was doing this kind of work for about six months in Ireland a while back for a completely different role. It was quite clearly mentally taxing and he broke down crying mid-interview.&lt;p&gt;I ended up canceling my following meeting and talking through things with him.&lt;p&gt;He was close to suicide, had cut contact with most people in his life and said that he hadn&amp;#x27;t been able to sleep or think straight since he started the work. 
Unfortunately I couldn&amp;#x27;t offer him any work, only a shoulder to cry on and a promise that there was beauty in the world as well.&lt;p&gt;I never thought a job could do so much mental damage to someone, but these jobs are horrible.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook&apos;s African Sweatshop</title><url>https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatment/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bArray</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure if this is supposed to cause outrage or not. I know for example companies like Facebook recruit in places like Holland too [1]. I&amp;#x27;m also aware that such jobs exist for checking child pornography too. These are not nice jobs, but they do need to be done. The important part is that people in these roles receive phycological support too, which I doubt they get when working for tech companies.&lt;p&gt;I always thought that a better model for moderation would be to distribute the effort. There will be people in my social bubble with similar reactions to the same content and once an algorithm understands these connections, it can distribute the effort of moderation amongst these like-minded people.&lt;p&gt;Another moderation tool would be to simply allow people to trade reputation (which has some value in terms of audience reach) for correctly tagging content.&lt;p&gt;On a different note, if you outsource your censorship, you will undoubtedly end up being censored based on the political ideology of the person doing the censoring.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jobsfactor.eu&amp;#x2F;job&amp;#x2F;49057&amp;#x2F;dutch-content-moderator&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jobsfactor.eu&amp;#x2F;job&amp;#x2F;49057&amp;#x2F;dutch-content-moderator&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>