Facebook content moderators says work in office risks their lives

More than 200 Facebook Inc. content moderators have said their lives are in danger from being required to work in offices in global hot spots during the pandemic.

Now, in addition to psychologically toxic work, keeping the job means stepping into a hot zone, outside contractors and Facebook employees wrote in a letter to executives at the social media company and contracting companies. published Wednesday. Moderators review explicit, violent and abusive content for removal from the Facebook social network.

The workers have asked the executives of Facebook and the executives of your outsourcing companies like Accenture and CPL to take urgent action to protect us and to value our work. You refused. Several cases of Covid-19 have occurred at the workplaces of moderators, according to the letter.

At the start of the pandemic, Facebook asked content moderators to work primarily from home. But some content, such as explicit pictures of children, had to be viewed legally in a safe environment; in these cases, Facebook attempted to use its artificial intelligence to weed out bad content, or asked some moderators to work in offices such as Austin, Texas.

The company relied more on AI moderation so that human workers could focus in recent months on election-related content and disinformation about Covid-19. Today, more and more Facebook contractors are back to work in offices. The authors of the letter said Facebook’s AI is simply not good enough to replace human judgment.

Facebook’s algorithms fall far short of the level of sophistication needed to automatically moderate content, the moderators said in the letter. “They may never make it.”

The moderators, who work for contracting companies such as Accenture Plc, are calling for full-time employment, risk premium and safer working conditions in light of the spread of Covid-19.

Facebook disputed the characterizations made in the letter.

While we believe in open internal dialogue, these discussions should be honest, Facebook said in a statement. “The majority of those 15,000 content reviewers around the world are working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of the pandemic.”