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January 9, 2020 10:40 pm

Facebook Is Forcing Its Moderators To Log Every Second of Their Days

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When Valera Zaicev began working in Dublin as one of Facebook's moderators a couple years ago, he knew he'd be looking at some of the most graphic and violent content on the internet. What he didn't know was that Facebook would be counting the seconds of his bathroom breaks. Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors, didn't always keep those employees on such a tight leash. When Zaicev, 33, joined Facebook's moderation army in July 2016, he found a professional workplace where he felt he received in-depth training and excellent treatment. But that all soon changed. As the number of moderators in the Dublin offices exploded -- rising from 120 to over 800 in two years -- the conditions deteriorated and training for moderators all but evaporated. By 2018, the number of content moderators worldwide continued to grow into the tens of thousands, and Facebook began testing a "time management system" designed to monitor every single minute of their day -- including lunch breaks, training, "wellness breaks" for counseling or yoga, and even the time they spent on the toilet, according to Zaicev and one current contracted employee, who did not want to be identified. In the past few years, Facebook has tried to fight back against criticism over how it deals with horrific content on the platform. The company has spent at least half a billion dollars hiring human moderators, in addition to the algorithms that already police its pages. Increasingly, Facebook moderators say their every move is monitored. When making decisions about content, for example, moderators have to follow an ever-changing document they call "the bible." And each moderator is given a "quality score." "You're allowed four or five mistakes a month -- a 2% failure rate, 98% quality score," said Chris Gray, a former Facebook moderator who worked at the company for 11 months. "So if you come in, and it's Tuesday or Wednesday, and you've got five mistakes, you are fucked for the month, and all you can think about is how to get the point back."

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