Executive Officer of Facebook, testifies remotely during the Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing on “Breaking the News: Censorship,
Suppression, and the 2020 Election” on November 17, 2020 in
Washington, DC. Photo By Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Image
More than 200 Facebook content moderators demanded
better health and safety protections Wednesday as the social media
giant called the workers back to the office during the
pandemic.
A petition signed by the contract workers living in various
countries said Facebook should guarantee better conditions or allow
the workers to continue their jobs from home.
“After months of allowing content moderators to work from home,
faced with intense pressure to keep Facebook free of hate and
disinformation, you have forced us back to the office,” said the
open letter released by the British-based legal activist firm
Foxglove.
The letter called on Facebook to “keep moderators and their
families safe” by maintaining remote work as much as possible and
offering “hazard pay” to those who do come in to the office.
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When the pandemic hit, Facebook sent home most of its content
moderators — those responsible for filtering violent and hateful
images as well as other content which violates platform rules.
But the social platform discovered limits on what remote
employees could do and turned to automated systems using artificial
intelligence, which had other shortcomings.
“We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do and we
prioritize their health and safety,” a Facebook spokesperson said
in a statement to AFP.
“The majority of these 15,000 global content reviewers have been
working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of
the pandemic,” the spokesperson said.
The workers’ letter said the current environment highlights the
need for human moderators.
“The AI wasn’t up to the job. Important speech got swept into
the maw of the Facebook filter — and risky content, like self-harm,
stayed up,” the letter said.
“The lesson is clear. Facebook’s algorithms are years away from
achieving the necessary level of sophistication to moderate content
automatically. They may never get there.”
The petition said Facebook should consider making the moderators
full employees — who in most cases may continue working remotely
through mid-2021.
“By outsourcing our jobs, Facebook implies that the 35,000 of us
who work in moderation are somehow peripheral to social media,” the
letter said, referring to a broader group of moderators that
includes the 15,000 content reviewers.
“Yet we are so integral to Facebook’s viability that we must
risk our lives to come into work.”
Read more https://swordpress.com.ng/2020/11/19/facebook-moderators-press-for-pandemic-safety-protections/