Facebook employs hundreds of young Filipinos to remove offensive material

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4548898/Facebook-young-Filipino-terror-related-material-Manchester.html

by recursion • 9 years ago

44 41 9 years ago

dailymail.co.uk

eswat• 9 years ago

The low wage isn’t surprising given the typical take-home pay in the Philippines. But it’s a force multiplier in depressing work when they have to filter through a lot of material that’s potentially traumatizing to a moderate Filipino that’s probably not mentally fit to handle this.

pmorici• 9 years ago

Frankly the amount of traumatizing material they are exposed to is probably pretty low. They aren't watching this materiel start to finish by the articles own admission they only have a few seconds to make a judgement. 99% of terrorist propaganda videos can be spotted by only watching the first few frames of video. They all have the same music / tone / symbolism.

burkaman• 9 years ago

For reference, the average household income in the Phillipines in 2015 was 22,000 pesos per month (https://psa.gov.ph/content/average-family-income-2015-estima...). Regardless, 48 hours a week of this sounds like a horrible job at any salary.

ouid• 9 years ago

Can anyone compare this to average pay for outsourced unskilled labor?

gravypod4• 9 years ago

I was about to throw away this napkin. Glad I hung on to it for a little longer. When I see things like this, I often ask myself "Why would people take this job?" and some times I find it's because it pays very well from the perspective of the local economy.

    1. £1.36 = 86.68 Philippine Peso (according to Google)
    2. average annual family income ... 267 thousand pesos [0]
    3. 267000 / 2 = ~133500 yearly person income
    4. There are about 2,087 work hours in a year [1]
    5. yearly/hours 133500/2087 = ~64 Philippine Peso

    * Average Guesstimated Salary: 64 Philippine Peso/hour
    * Facebook Censurer Take Home: 87 Philippine Peso/hour

That's about 30% more then the average take home.

Let me crunch the numbers again for the top 10% earners [0] bracket.

    1. (786000/2)/2087 = 188 Philippine Peso/hour

That means a person in a top 10% earners household is only making about (188/87) 2.16 times what you make.

According to Investopedia the "average household income for the top 10% of earners is higher, at $295,845". which means that running the same numbers...

    1. (295845/2)/2087 = 70
    2. 70 / 2.16       = $32 USD/HR

Since they are earning 2.16 times less then the top 10% bracket I'd guess that taking (top 10% hourly wage / 2.16) would give you a localized approximation for your economy. Doing this job is the local equivalent of ~$32 USD/HR in USA money for reading Facebook posts and deciding if it is terrorism or not.

I know I've definitely gotten some stuff wrong here. Please correct me if you know better.

[0] https://psa.gov.ph/content/average-family-income-2015-estima...

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...

[2] http://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-to...

developer22• 9 years ago

I don't think anyone is disputing the "benefit" to the worker, from their perspective. The outrage is that corporations take advantage. They refuse to employ US employees because they would have to pay reasonable wages, provide healthcare, offer stock options, etc. So they outsource to skirt millions on all of the above.

I'm really sick and tired of "but they're happy to have the abysmally low-paying job, because in their currency it's above-average!". Companies like Facebook aren't outsourcing to "give jobs to the needy"; they only do it because it's disgustingly cheap for them. The destitute, desperately grasping at the crumbs dropped on the floor by the rich, is not a positive thing. It's depressing.

What's next? Do we defend companies who hold immigrants' passports hostage, enslaving people indefinitely with no way out? After all, they pay X% above average! Those workers should be thankful just to have a job! Who cares that they'll never see their family again, and likely die while living in squalor?

gravypod4• 9 years ago

I agree with you. I don't think it's right but we're in a shitty situation now. You have the following choices:

    1. Choose to fire the now reasonably well off employees forcing them to go back to a previous lines of employment that were less lucrative
    2. Force companies to stop outsourcing labor which will in turn make it more likely for other countries to create similar sanctions like this against you.
    3. Make companies pay foreign employees a "reasonable" rate based on local offering thereby making these jobs infinitely more lucrative then even well-educated professions and ultimately tilting their economy in an unwanted direction.

We live in times where economic action is also foreign policy. How would you like it if a country richer then yours started offering jobs for 100x the average wage that you are used to? Would you try and get one of those jobs? Would people start expecting that wage in other places? Would this change the way the market behaves?

The destitute, desperately grasping at the crumbs dropped on the floor by the rich, is not a positive thing

I wouldn't call the Philippines destitute. I know a few people who'd be offended by that characterization. I'd also ask: why are these people doing these jobs if it's not better then what they were doing before? Better either being higher pay, easier labor, or more enjoyable work environment.

threeseed• 9 years ago

I think your anger is misguided and ignorant.

(a) They do receive reasonable wages. Better than the average in fact as the parent articulated. If you paid them US wages you would be completely distorting the local economy as suddenly you've created a community of millionaires. Do you really want medical/law students etc dropping out to become Facebook moderators because the money is so much better ?

(b) There is universal health care in Phillipines. Companies paying for health care is a US concept that doesn't apply in many other countries.

(c) They are employees of Accenture not Facebook. And not sure where you get the idea that all employees get stock options. That's something that again is a foreign concept in most places in the world.

vitaminbandit• 9 years ago

Who are they taking advantage of? The workers who make more than they would otherwise?

Or are they taking advantage of the Americans that they don't employ?

pvg2• 9 years ago

'average' and 'what factor off 10% of US earners' contain some assumptions about distributions that make this a less informative comparison than it might seem. You probably also want 'censor'.

gravypod4• 9 years ago

contain some assumptions about distributions that make this a less informative comparison

I feel the same about this information. If anyone has plots they can through up I'd love to take a look.

You probably also want 'censor'.

You are correct. I'll leave that unchanged because it doesn't effect the meaning of the post.

kartan4• 9 years ago

average annual family income

If you get 10% over the "average annual family income" of a USA family, but you live in San Francisco Area, you are screwed.

I understand your point, but "Doing this job is the local equivalent of ~$32 USD/HR in USA money for reading Facebook posts and deciding if it is terrorism or not." it's a big jump into conclusions without having more information. With 300,000 km2 and 100 million citizens probably requires more analysis. So maybe is a good job, it doesn't look like a bad one. Bud the "equivalence" is not as easy to get to.

nesu• 9 years ago

30% more than average take home, in a country where about a quarter of the population are below the poverty line.

ChoGGi• 9 years ago

Hard to call this news

http://gawker.com/5885714/inside-facebooks-outsourced-anti-p...

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

cttet• 9 years ago

Poor Butters

dirtylowprofile4• 9 years ago

I'm from the Philippines and 6 day week is frowned upon. I can't believe Facebook has tolerated this. As with other countries, we only work for 5 days. Corporate greed is taking advantage of the small rates here.

I know outsourcing is good here. I know a lot of small startups here who does not take advantage of the cheap talent rates here. But this is Facebook. They preach "work life balance" on their blogs but seem to tolerate modern slavery here in my country. This is wrong. I hope this gets to the front page of your blogs and newspaper here.

mistermann3• 9 years ago

Things like this bother me.....why insist upon 6 day weeks, what difference does it make to Facebook really, compared to just hiring a few more people? It's almost like they're not happy unless their employees are unhappy.

lovich• 9 years ago

If its like the outsourced firms I've worked with at my employers, unless you make specific clauses in your contract about how the employees of your contractor will be treated, the managers of these would just pocket any money given to treat the employees better and continue on as normal

brogrammernot• 9 years ago

I have no frame of reference for that pay. Is the pay low or normal? Is the main issue the required 6 days/week?

dirtylowprofile4• 9 years ago

The pay is decent enough. But the job description for a kid straight out of college, filtering disturbing videos is not something I would recommend. And imagine doing this for 6 days per week with a quota. And you get fired for not getting the quota.

This terror, fake news, live disturbing videos has been going on for Facebook for years now, I think they should have developed some kind of machine learning to at least detect and reduce a sort of percentage than get this fresh college kids to filter them. Instead they prioritize releasing new emotions stickers and transforming their messenger to a Snapchat clone.

ageek123• 9 years ago

I'm sympathetic, but saying that working six days a week (which MANY Americans do) is "modern slavery" seems like quite a stretch.

johnchristopher• 9 years ago

But why compare to America ? To MANY, It's not the best country to live in. Plus, what good is having modern job in a modern world that sucks up so much time for work ? Can't we get a bit of the good parts of the Star Trek utopia :) ?

dirtylowprofile4• 9 years ago

We're not America. Some may work the same as 6 day work week, but still our rate is like 1/12 of how much you guys own in an hour. Shit, some gringos even asked me $400 to have them develop an app for them. That is like one day for an engineer from Silicon Valley.

unfunco• 9 years ago

Compare wages, living conditions, and working conditions.

Intentional hyperbole: being forced into wage slavery in order to afford basic food and clean drinking water is a little different than taking a driverless car to the Googleplex on a Saturday morning for free breakfast and a game of ping pong.

kartan4• 9 years ago

Facebook employs hundreds of young Filipinos - some with limited English skills - to remove offensive and terror related material from the site

1984 was wrong on this one. The censorship doesn't come from an all knowledgable goberment, but it comes from low-cost teenagers.

What impact is going to have into the global communications to introduce such a specific bias? What impact is going to have in the psychology of these young employees, that already live in a violent country?

bananaXbanana• 9 years ago

These people don't make any individual decision. They have a word document in front of them with official guidelines for any case.

kartan4• 9 years ago

These people don't make any individual decision.

Yes, they have. If it were possible to fully automate the task, Facebook will not hire humans. From the article: "The moderators have to check posts that have been flagged up and make a snap judgement on whether they should be taken down.". Some videos are probably easy to identify, but the world is a scale of grays.

tajen• 9 years ago

Will young Philippinos empathize with terrorist causes after reading too much?

kartan4• 9 years ago

Will young Philippinos empathize with terrorist causes after reading too much?

I didn't say anything about terrorism. I was talking about "One ex-manager who helped recruit Facebook moderators said staff were often traumatised by material.". Sorry for not being more clear.

Stressful traumatizing jobs can have a worse impact in a poor country that in one where there is more help available.

beedogs• 9 years ago

I'm pretty much done with Facebook for good. They simply don't give a shit about the rampant racism, sexism, and homophobia going on all over their site. Reporting comments gets you nowhere. Calling out these idiots gets you banned. And now, come to find out, they're paying their moderators subsistence wages to do all the work of policing the place. I'm moving on.

pasta• 9 years ago

This is not a news article, this is sugar for the brain.

They are 'forced' to do the job?

They only get paid $'x' without any reference to local income?

Some workers work 6 days a week? Do they choose to do so to earn more?

This is very bad reporting and for me has near zero value.

louithethrid• 9 years ago

Imagine this is your only impression of the west- you go to work and get to see 4chan as a constant stream on a daily basis, without the larger context.

My argument is that this outsourcing has a hidden cost, of radicalizing a anti-western, anti-captialistic youth wherever it happens. This is not just some shit-job exported- this is a problem creator at its finest.

This is hurting progress in this countrys. This is supporting religions who where constantly in decline. Sorry facebook, this might be a solution for you, but for the rest of humanity, this is a problem.

Facebook employs hundreds of young Filipinos to remove offensive material

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