[Mobius]

http://theinternetoffendsme.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/the-real-story-behind-facebook-moderation-and-your-petty-reports/

Considering all of these things, I’d like to tell you what offends me. It offends me that nearly 80% of the manual reports I have to read are from people who find themselves offended by something. A recent list of offenses include: (Translated from the the poor excuses for grammar and spelling most of them arrive in)

“I don’t believe in this coin. It goes against what I believe in.”
“This fish doesn’t look like a fish, it looks like a man’s private parts, and I have small children around me during the day.”
“I saw this on my feed and I do not approve please take it off.”
“This page shared my picture without credit or permission.”
“Can you remove this picture I don’t like it.”
This is not true, my God would never let this happen.
Now, forgive me or not, but personally I can assure you of this. In the face of the actual reportable issues that come in at the rate of 250k per hour, I really don’t give a **** if coins offend you, or if you can’t keep your ass off Facebook while you babysit the neighborhood children. What I care about, what really, truly ****ing offends me is the fact that after 5 hours of reading through your butthurt sob stories, I find the 7 year old girl who, too scared to tell an authority has figured out how to report a picture her uncle posted of her that was blatantly, obviously sexual, and begged for help. “He says he’s coming over today at 2. Can you please help me, I don’t know what to do.”

If You Think Your Biggest Problems on Facebook are Photos or Statuses that Offend You – You Have No Idea How Often I Eye Your Account for Deletion

Thanks to your delicate sensibilities, I didn’t get to read her report until it was 5 her time. Four hours ago I could have possibly prevented another one of her rapes. I could have had the police waiting for him when he arrived at her house. Four hours from now I’ll probably cry myself to sleep because I didn’t get to. Thanks again, to people who obviously need to stay the **** off of the internet. Why did her report not come up faster? Because she’s seven, she reported the picture as a lesser offense that reported properly would have bumped it up the queue past all of your cries of visual injustice. Those pieces of ugliness that are top-o-the-queue every morning.

This is... scary. 

[General Battuta]

Hahahahahahahahah holy **** these comments. These are sublime.

carolyn says : April 14, 2013 at 10:43 am
still no answer about why there are so few monitors that a child rape victim can’t get through to anyone for over half a day. If they provide a platform for these rapists, shouldn’t they provide a safety net for their victims that cry out for help?

Joy Lynskey says : April 14, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Read the article you stupid *****. WHY ARE YOU NOT GETTING THAT WE COULD GET TO THOSE RAPE VICTIMS IF SAD SACKS OF USELESS **** LIKE YOU WEREN’T REPORTING **** YOU DON’T AGREE WITH. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO PASTE THE LAST 3 REPORTS YOU MADE HERE SO EVERYONE CAN SEE WHAT A CRAZY **** YOU ARE?

#

Qua says : April 14, 2013 at 10:47 am
Hah, yeah I couldn’t agree more, seriously. These people often fill me with rage. I’m so irritated by the fact they keep making computers easier and easier to use and building OS’s like Windows 8, simply to appeal to these ignorant, knuckle-dragging troglodytes, because they not only take away all functionality and joy for REAL computer users and people intelligent enough to be able to use one correctly without having it turned into something that acts worse than what you would find on a tablet or i-pad

This woman sounds completely unhinged, but I don't blame her for being a little cracked up if she's dealing with loads of complaints about "breast feeding pictures, two men getting married or breast cancer survivors tattoos" instead of criminal activity. Still, there's something beautifully ironic that it all ends with an appeal to like her Facebook page.

best of the best

carolyn says : April 14, 2013 at 11:40 am
It took you seven years to be bad enough to avoid helping the rape victim?

 Joy Lynskey says : April 14, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Yeah? So you are here to taunt me for not being able to help a rape victim? How long did it take you to learn to be such a raging useless ****?

 carolyn says : April 14, 2013 at 12:09 pm
“How long did it take you to learn to be such a raging useless ****?”
WELL, i DON’T HAVE THE EXPERIENCE OR JEST FOR IT THAT YOU DO, BUT I’VE BEEN WORKING ON IT SINCE I WAS RAPED AS A CHILD, AND WATCHED THE ADULTS LIKE YOU TELL HOW HARD IS WAS ON THEM, AND GET ALL INTO THEIR OWN GRIEF. I await your filthy mouthed preply, probably blaming me for my own rape.Because I dared question your own self pity.have you turned my IP in to the internet police yet? Oh, wait…You are the internet police. No wonder you are os damaged and profane.

 Joy Lynskey says : April 14, 2013 at 12:14 pm
Aw **** you ****. Here you are ranting about your own personal me issue again and saying that it’s because of people like me? Shut the **** up and go cry to someone who gives a **** about your adult ass. You are blaming me for ‘letting a little girl get raped’ which makes you a sick *****. You have done nothing but troll here and make snide comments and ignorant judgements. I didn’t have **** to do with your rape, if someone is still alive that did, I’d suggest you go have it out with them. This isn’t a site for therapy, and you need some.

 Joy Lynskey says : April 14, 2013 at 12:28 pm
[link to carolyn's facebook profile]
There you go. Now anyone who agrees with you can go talk to you on your facebook profile. That’s where you belong. Not here.

In broad terms this is a signal detection problem similar to those constantly faced by law enforcement and intelligence. Ideally people would have better ways to report these crimes than via Facebook, but inevitably (in no small part because a lot of the victims are young, or the reported content is indirect tells through material posted to Facebook) you're going to get actionable cues this way. From her comments it sounds like Facebook already has some kind of tiered sorting system and she's not at the lowest level, but I guess if her complaints are valid their line of attack on this problem - which it sounds like they're treating as a human intelligence task after the first line of automation - isn't working as well as it could.

[Gray113]

I think this guy has touched a few nerves judging by those comments.

[General Battuta]

I think this guy has touched a few nerves judging by those comments.

Gal

[Lorric]

Oh my. Has anyone read the whole thing?

"Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? I’ve probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar. It’s fair to say that some of the people who work around me do not fare so well. Often they end up suffering from the endless barrage of horror they witness 8 to 12 hours per day. Did I share that *most* of these people make around a dollar per hour to do this job? That’s the truth. Not me though. I am an American who demands rights and all, so I make approximately $29 dollars per hour more than them. Technically, I don’t even have to do anymore than make sure they are clicking the buttons in the correct order. I don’t have to look at the images, but most of the time my focus on remaining unbiased in the face of, makes me do so anyway.

It’s Not All Blood and Guts, Sometimes it’s Worse
Not all of the information that Facebook moderators are privy to is as horrifying as the end results mention above, some are worse. The terror in those is that they are the calls of those whose private horrors, abuse or murders are currently in process. True cries for help come from FB users every day, all day long. Facebook moderators spend a significant part of each workday forwarding ‘acts in progress’ to the authorities local to those accounts. When those accounts are legitimate (not ghosted or proxies) those reports can and do save people’s lives. That is probably the number one reason why many traumatized by the visual horrors still stick around."

Well now HLP mods, aren't you happy you aren't Facebook mods! 

$1 and hour? $30 an hour? You couldn't pay me anything to put up with that!

[Qent]

$1 and hour? $30 an hour? You couldn't pay me anything to put up with that!

That sounds... really really horrible when applied to the second paragraph you pasted.

I don't use Facebook, but this gives me a new kind of respect for their moderators.

[Lorric]

$1 and hour? $30 an hour? You couldn't pay me anything to put up with that!

That sounds... really really horrible when applied to the second paragraph you pasted.

I don't use Facebook, but this gives me a new kind of respect for their moderators.

I don't use it either. Hello, rare fellow non-facebook user! 

[FreeSpaceFreak]

"Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results.

Unholy **** ... I want off this planet.

For the record, I don't have facebook either. And this is one of those things that make me glad I don't.

[General Battuta]

Facebook doesn't cause these behaviors, nor are you exposed to them as a Facebook user. Why does this make you glad you don't have Facebook? These things are going to happen with or without some ****ty social networking site; your disgust should be aimed at the crimes, not the method used to detect them.

The issue here is that Facebook receives reports of criminal evidence and (according to this post) has trouble sorting actionable signal out of the enormous volume of noise.

[Turambar]

Now i feel bad for reporting that pro-life page as a hate group :-(

[Polpolion]

Now i feel bad for reporting that pro-life page as a hate group :-(

Yeah, I used to report every ad I saw as spam... oops.

[Nuke]

nuke the internet!

[yuezhi]

nuke the internet!

i hope HLP has some kind of contingency plan for that.

[The E]

Yes, we use nuke as our internet.

[An4ximandros]

What if Nuke fails us?

[Nohiki]

IMHO a 7 year old on facebook is simply someone's fail at parenting. Or is it just me? It always amazes me when I find a profile of a person who still has 2 months left to be born and similar atrocities.

[Nuke]

Yes, we use nuke as our internet.

i have a nice little protocal called madnet. packets are sent in the form of nuclear warheads on an icbm. when you want to transmit a packet you encode your message in the dispersion pattern of the warheads. when the packet arrives at its destination, the detonations can be observed and recorded, and the message determined with several geiger counters and math. in response you must send an ack packet, in the form of an icbm (this works the same way as a data frame) or a nak packet on error, if no packet is received the message is transmitted again until proper response is received. on nak, you must retransmit.

it will be way better than the internet ever was, and i dont think you need to worry about so much moderator spam either.

What if Nuke fails us?

only in soviet russia.

[Qent]

IMHO a 7 year old on facebook is simply someone's fail at parenting. Or is it just me?

Not just you, but I think that this particular 7-year-old had some bigger parenting fails in her life.

[FireSpawn]

This has given me a whole other level of respect for Mods across the board. I never really considered how much responsibility is put in the hands of mods (Socal Networking in particular), as I thought it was mostly just trying to keep the peace and make sure people abide by the rules.  But this has helped me see that sometime the responsibilities can extend beyond the website and actually impact people's worlds in life changing ways. Those guys are sort of the unsung heroes in those stories you see on the news where criminals get put away due to being reported on a social networking site.

I have much to think about.

[deathfun]

I was actually called by the local constables for a comment I posted once

It was how to kill a goldfish, related to the topic of "How can I kill my goldfish"