God help us. These workers are employed by a subcontractor, Covalen.
Multiple workers from Covalen’s ‘AI annotation’ service spoke to The Journal Investigates about their roles. Their day-to-day work involves creating prompts that are fed to Meta’s AI platform so the system can be trained according to guidelines.
In order to do this, some workers have spent entire shifts pretending to be paedophiles online seeking child sex abuse related information, or suicidal people looking for details on how to kill or hurt themselves.
Covalen also does moderation for Meta, with workers forced to watch extremely violent and disturbing footage that has been flagged for moderation.
“Sometimes in my dreams I am the victim, but sometimes – and this is far worse – I am the perpetrator,” they said.
One bright spot:
Over 100 Covalen employees have now joined the Communications Workers Union (CWU). The toll that dealing with sensitive content and inconsistencies in wellness break length were extra motivating factors for the move.
They are also asking for a better rate of pay, as they are currently earning an average of €29,700 per year.
I think we’re well past “God help us” and into “God forgive us” territory. I started driving a delivery van for Amazon to pay the bills while hopefully getting back into the actual network exorcism business and I think as of tonight I think I’m gonna stop complaining about it.
Two passages that were particularly what in the everfucking fuck:
Now, slurs based on someone’s “protective characteristics” are deemed “safe” according to the new policy followed by moderators.
This means that homophobic content that would previously have been removed now has to be marked as safe and left on the platform. Some of the moderators having to carry out these orders are themselves part of the LGBT community.
“One girl was on the content moderation team for child sexual exploitation, and it was suggested to her because she watched the same kind of content every day – namely child sexual exploitation material – she needed less time for wellness breaks, because she should be ‘desensitised’ to that kind of material by now,” they said.
