Facebook’s Contracted Moderators Say They’re Paid to Follow Orders, Not Think
Workers say they were discouraged from speaking up when they found flaws in the company’s policies
We know by now that moderating Facebook is a nightmare. We know that developing and enforcing a consistent set of rules across 2 billion users across nearly 200 countries is nigh impossible. We know that Facebook outsources the majority of the thankless task to ill-compensated contractors, who often work under mentally and psychologically grueling conditions.
But this week, three people who have worked as contract moderators for Facebook — two former, and one current — raised an important point that I don’t think has received quite as much attention. It has to do with corporate culture and communication channels, and how Facebook has (perhaps inadvertently) insulated itself from the resource best positioned to help it improve its policies and processes: the frontline contract moderators themselves.
The moderators spoke on a press call Monday organized by the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” a group of academics, activists, and critics who have set themselves up as a counterweight to Facebook’s official Oversight Board for Content Decisions. The two former moderators spoke on the record to the media for the first time, while the current moderator spoke anonymously via a voice recording. Their goal was to make the case that Facebook should recognize moderation as a critical, essential part of its business, and bring moderators in-house as full employees rather than outsourcing the job. (An in-depth NYU report earlier this year made the same case, as did I in September after Mark Zuckerberg admitted to moderation failures — er, an “operational mistake” — in the wake of the Kenosha shooting.)
While much press coverage has focused on the hardships faced by Facebook’s contracted moderators, the three who spoke Monday spent little time on that. Instead, they emphasized how outsourcing moderation undermines Facebook’s ability to improve its own rules and systems.
They described how moderators routinely face thorny, subtle decisions in which the company’s guidelines either fail to prescribe a clear answer, or prescribe an answer that seems…
