Why India should be the centre for content moderation reform
Earlier this month, Facebook settled a lawsuit that required the company to give $52 million in a settlement to content moderators experiencing mental health issues. For the reason that light, the next time when you flick through your Facebook/Instagram feed, take the time to realise just what a miracle it is that this content there is commonly well suited for consumption. When social media platforms reached vast sums of monthly active users (credit to Chamath Palihapitiya for discovering the metric), they brought a lot of humanity’s worst instincts online.
Think child sexual abuse, cannibalism, animal cruelty, and violence towards infants. Because of easy access to the web and the cheap affordances of smartphones, all of this is posted to platforms like 8chan, Facebook, and Instagram. There are two significant points of failure here. Firstly, the majority of this content is usually to be moderated by humans. This brings about a complete host of mental medical issues, best documented by Casey Newton from the Verge. In an in depth report on this issue, Newton writes, “It is an environment where employees cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions”. Furthermore, “In expect a dopamine rush amid the misery (people) ..have been found having sex inside stairwells”. A significant number of moderators for some platforms are contracted through companies such as Cognizant, Genpact, and Accenture. As standard practice, they are asked to sign non-disclosure agreements asking them never to reveal information regarding their work to even their own families. Moderators going through hundreds of content decisions a day tend to suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They are generally in need of a therapist which isn't provided or insured.
Secondly, it really is hard to maintain standards of free speech when platforms operate in greater than a hundred countries. Not absolutely all countries are democracies, and even in democracies, there are dissimilarities in what's acceptable under the free speech umbrella. As a platform, if you maintain American standards of expression, you may well be blamed for not adapting sufficiently to your surroundings. Alternatively, it is hard to build capacity and conform to speech standards in over 100 languages.
Due to this fact, standards of expression is a dynamic process, with guidelines for what is acceptable being constantly updated. On a side tangent, that is partly why a Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ was constituted.
In light of most of this, let us try to seem sensible of the $52 million settlement since there is a lot of small print to cover. As the sum is the most crucial acknowledgement by Facebook about how precisely damaging content moderation could be for ‘employees’, it generally does not apply to moderators in every countries. Specifically, the lawsuit covers only people who've worked for Facebook through third-party vendors in the United States from 2015 until today, (estimated to be 11,250 people).
As the sum itself is significant, I'd argue that changes to how content moderation takes places are worth more. Learnings out of this settlement shouldn't be limited to the united states, but instead, applied globally, starting with India.
The reason why I emphasise India, is basically because two forces make content moderation in India a significant pain point. Firstly, India is probably the global capitals for the BPO industry. The critical known reasons for that will be the massive user base in addition to a population that speaks English as another language. You may feel that content moderators generally work from a dingy basement lit by computer screens. However, the truth is that they are based in big corporate buildings in Gurugram.
Secondly, going to remedy is taboo in India, even among urban elites. So moderators facing mental health challenges may find it hard to speak about them, and their pleas may fall on deaf ears in the home and in the workplace.
In line with the Verge, the settlement makes meaningful changes to content moderation tools that might help in mitigating mental medical issues caused by the work. In fact it is these changes India’s content moderation industry ought to be banking on. Many of these tools include changing videos to black and white and muting audio tracks by default. Furthermore, the settlement includes increasing option of mental health professionals to moderators. The latter includes not simply counsellors (who are regarded as more concerned about getting employees back again to work instead of caring about their mental health), but also individual and group remedy sessions.
You could put a cost tag on what it costs to keep platforms clean of harmful content. $52 million is a wonderful starting place (and an underestimation). However the learnings that come out of the experience have the potential to be priceless. Not only in terms of how much money they can potentially save in counselling costs, but regarding preventing the mental harm that content moderation causes persons who undertake it.
