Back in the days of the early internet, it was quite the trend to send people to “shock” sites. These were usually very graphic photographs — the kind which “can’t be unseen.” I’m sure people of a...
Back in the days of the early internet, it was quite the trend to send people to “shock” sites. These were usually very graphic photographs — the kind which “can’t be unseen.”
I’m sure people of a certain age can name several well-known ones. If you’re my age, you don’t even need me to list them out. You already know. That’s how impactful some of them were.
I say this because it helps me put into perspective what these people are being asked to do. Imagine having to watch nothing but shock sites for hours at a time. Every day.
Imagine being pressured to do it even faster — to accelerate the rate at which you observe horrible, scarring content that “can’t be unseen.” The kind of content that, decades later, many of us can still summon into our mind’s eye despite seeing them for only a fraction of a second before we mashed the X in the corner of our screens, trying to make those awful images go away as quickly as possible.
It was not just the type of content I had to watch that gave me insomnia, anxiety and migraines, it was the quantity too. In Sama we had something called AHT, or action handling time. This was the amount of time we were given to analyse and rate a piece of content. We were being timed, and the company measured our success in seconds. We were constantly under pressure to get it right.
You could not stop if you saw something traumatic. You could not stop for your mental health. You could not stop to go the bathroom. You just could not stop. We were told the client, in our case Facebook, required us to keep going.
People used to send shock sites to friends because they knew it was upsetting. That was the whole point. Accelerating and systematizing that sort of thing, as Facebook has done, is genuinely inhuman.
Yeah, that unfortunately checks out. I hear Google (for Youtube) made a much stricter schedule due to those mental health reasons. Something to the tune of only working at content moderation for...
Yeah, that unfortunately checks out. I hear Google (for Youtube) made a much stricter schedule due to those mental health reasons. Something to the tune of only working at content moderation for 2-3 weeks at a time, with a mental health professional close at hand once their shift is done. It's some damaging stuff.
Back in the days of the early internet, it was quite the trend to send people to “shock” sites. These were usually very graphic photographs — the kind which “can’t be unseen.”
I’m sure people of a certain age can name several well-known ones. If you’re my age, you don’t even need me to list them out. You already know. That’s how impactful some of them were.
I say this because it helps me put into perspective what these people are being asked to do. Imagine having to watch nothing but shock sites for hours at a time. Every day.
Imagine being pressured to do it even faster — to accelerate the rate at which you observe horrible, scarring content that “can’t be unseen.” The kind of content that, decades later, many of us can still summon into our mind’s eye despite seeing them for only a fraction of a second before we mashed the X in the corner of our screens, trying to make those awful images go away as quickly as possible.
People used to send shock sites to friends because they knew it was upsetting. That was the whole point. Accelerating and systematizing that sort of thing, as Facebook has done, is genuinely inhuman.
I've heard horror stories from content moderators, specifically Facebook ones. They had to pay $52m because the moderators kept getting PTSD.
Yeah, that unfortunately checks out. I hear Google (for Youtube) made a much stricter schedule due to those mental health reasons. Something to the tune of only working at content moderation for 2-3 weeks at a time, with a mental health professional close at hand once their shift is done. It's some damaging stuff.
At least, this is what I heard soke 12 years ago.