‘It scars you for life’: Workers sue Meta claiming viewing brutal videos caused psychological trauma::More than 20% of the staff Meta hired to check the violent content of Facebook and Instagram are on sick leave due to psychological trauma.
Couldn’t they hire from watchpeopledie or nothingtoxic or ebaum. Those users probably would do overtime for free.
People that are completely desensitized to that kind of stuff would probably not be very good at moderating it really.
Also this is a terrible job and I’d be very worried if a company was paying and enabling people who find that fun. It’s horrible, but trauma is the normal outcome.
Sounds like the perfect job for AI
I feel sorry for whichever researchers are in charge of training and fine tuning those models… ouch
Maybe they still have the content that got removed because of that, you might be able to train an AI just on that. That way they don’t need to manually check it, it’s already been done after all.
Exactly, and even if the content uploaded disagrees and request human oversight that is just one image that needs to be checked rather then all. Ai may even be able to blur parts of footage that are most brutal and extreme and create written transcripts of audio You dont need 4k resolution and hearable screaming to understand that someone is getting murderered or Raped.
True, didn’t think about that. Blurring and transcripts are also way more reliable, so it will work correctly almost always.
They used AI to flag the images but a human still had to search through them
I am of the kind that is very wary with what should or should not be an AI’s job, and you know what, in this very particular case, I think I agree.
At least as a first filter, anyway.
Honestly I don’t see an issue with it. If they can tell the difference between an image that should be moderated and one that shouldn’t they can do the job and I seriously doubt the vast majority of people desensitized to that kind of content can’t tell the difference. That’s like the arguments that we shouldn’t make graphic games or movies because people won’t be able to tell the difference between them and reality. Not everyone can do every job and these people would be the perfect fit for it and we would spare others from getting hurt
It would be a highly unethical but interesting research to see if those people experience long-term consequences nevertheless. Or if being desensitizes really does give someone immunity.
Desensitized doesn’t necessarily mean somebody doesn’t have reactions to something. It just means they can compartmentalize those reactions and move forward and deal with the ramifications later.
EMTs, ER Doctors, and Nurses are largely desensitized to graphic trauma and can press through and get the job done. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t process those scenes later in both healthy and unhealthy ways (there’s a few study out there that show ER staff have higher rates of alcoholism and substance abuse rates than the general public).
Tramua is trauma, whether you’re desensitized or not.
Except, you know, we’re talking people who are progressively desensitized to reality. So no, that’s not comparable at all.
You’re not thinking awful enough
Fuck that job.
I’ve heard this is also the case for civilians and officers working for police departments who are responsible for handling evidence related to child abuse. Takes a lot of psychological support, which I’m not sure can ever be enough.
Not every job is something humans are cut out for. This is a job AI should be taking off our plates.
But then who will give therapy to the AI?
That’s the beauty of it. Each new instance of the AI has no prior memories, so the sorry devil gets to relive its first day on the job forever.
We get an dedicated ai to monitor the wellbeing of the first ai. The moment it does something unexpected we pull the plug.
Though we dont know what effect that may have on ai 2 so we should probably get a third ai to…
So we train our AIs to hide their mental health?
Its what we do towards people and that has been working flawlessly with no side-effects /s
Context: “professional autist*
Oh so it’s just like normal employee training.
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Many places like that have protocols for how long your shifts can be and how long you can do it, with constant psych support while you do it in order to reduce and mitigate the impact of the material. Meta may have been pushing their workers too hard and cutting corners.
Secondary trauma is very real. I’ve done freelance work around focus groups for some traumatic things and the person I worked with on it made sure that I had proper support for it. That I took time to process the disturbing things. I don’t understand why when they obviously found a video that violated guidelines that they had to watch the entire thing if they weren’t going to give them proper psychological supports or processing time.
Jobs that involve this type of imagery are traumatic and should be treated as such. Extra vacation time, proper psychological support not just “your doing import work” but actual trauma processing work. But when has a large company like Meta cared about its employees?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 20% of the staff Meta hired to check the violent content of Facebook and Instagram are on sick leave due to psychological trauma.
More than 20% of the staff of CCC Barcelona Digital Services - owned by Telsus, the company that Meta hired to check the content of Facebook and Instagram, are on sick leave due to psychological trauma.
The images posted on the social networks they were supposed to check showed the worst of humanity: videos of murders, dismemberments, rapes and live suicides.
He sticks a knife in its chest, rips out its heart and eats it," Francesc Feliu, lawyer for more than a dozen workers who decided to sue the company, told Euronews.
The psychologist would listen to them and then tell them that what they were doing was extremely important for society, that they had to imagine that what they were seeing was not real but a film, and that they should go back to work," says the Spanish lawyer.
Both lawyers agree that Meta’s policy of forcing employees to watch the entire video in order to explain all the reasons for censorship aggravates the trauma.
The original article contains 986 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Should there be a disclaimer before hiring? I mean don’t apply for the job if it’s going to bother you. I sure hope they were not forced by the boss to suck it up.
I admit I’m a bit desensitized to gore but I don’t know if I can handle truly brutal videos.
Pretty sure that if you get to see a lot of “Violent Content” on your Facebook, you’re either following the wrong groups or have wrong friends who you chose to allow to (or you’re specifically looking it up 😅). If there’s anything Facebook is good at, it’s at keeping people cosy in their selective information bubble. I myself have maybe had 5 posts that actually had shocking content I rather not had seen in the 14 years I was on Facebook, and I think most of them by the same 1 person that I eventually asked to exclude me if they post stuff alike… 😅
Not gonna argue that visual shock trauma isn’t a thing, it surely is! (I have sadly collected a small (mind-)museum of those in my lifetime myself.) Nor am I gonna claim Facebook “isn’t that bad”, it definitely is too! But this just has moneyfishing written all over it.
👴🏼 Oh, well,… Back in my day, when we saw something that would scar us for life, we’d immediately call as many friends possible to come look at it too… 👴🏼 😅
This is about the people who have to check if this stuff is violating the rules, not users who happened to see it
Did you read the article or just skim the headline?
are you lost ?
Exactly. If Facebook content moderators don’t like to see that stuff they shouldn’t be following those Facebook groups.
