Action wants long-term commitments to be more than a ‘publicity stunt’, employees say
Current and former Facebook moderators have called for an unprecedented boycott of advertisers through ads to result in the action being more than a “press coup.”
Speaking to the Guardian, an existing moderator who asked to remain anonymous because he feared for his work, he said that without a long-term commitment, it is a “press coup that will pass when they get tired of the reports they want.”
The boycott, which he recently joined through British Blake Drinks, Pukka Herbs and food company Cook Cook, was organized from mid-June in reaction to Facebook’s perception of hate speech on the site. Since then, it has become the largest advertiser boycott in the site’s history, adding familiar names such as Disney, Unilever and Volkswagen, but was due to end last July.
Even before the boycott began, some questioned its effectiveness. Facebook’s ad gains come largely from the “long road”: smaller advertisers who make up for what they lack in individual expenses. “Millions and millions of small businesses will have to pay for ads – that’s all they can do,” said Chris Gray, a former Facebook moderator in Ireland. “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care. He officially said they’d come back. Therefore, I have no conviction that this will achieve anything.”
An existing moderator agreed and told the Guardian last month, “I don’t think Facebook cares, and they haven’t lost any revenue. That’s about 5% of your lost income, and it probably wouldn’t last until the end of July, so you’re going to get over it.
“It’s just that their policies are getting attention. In this way, we can all take advantage of it. But in the face of the attack, they are retreating, so it’s hard to wait for what the effect will be.”
Gray, who is suing the Dublin-based company for post-traumatic stress disorder which he said was inflicted as a component of his moderator duties, also warned that demands to act more temporarily on hate speech can bounce off the underpaid moderators doing the job. “Everyone jumps up and down, and nobody cares about the other people who will do the job,” he said. “You need FB [Facebook] to do more – well, what do you need the guy to do in the workplace, between his PTSD and his ridiculous race conditions?”
Another moderator, who still works at the company, disagreed. “The workload would remain the same, it’s just that we’d press other buttons when we see the content.
“In terms of our intellectual health, we would feel much better if we could eliminate more. One of the tensioners is that we have to leave on the platform things that we think are destructive and notoriously bad. Much tension comes from the fact that we have minorities among us, and we rarely have to explain to them why what they know is a hate speech cannot be suppressed.”
Another existing moderator, who helped write an open letter to Paid Facebook workers when they came out in May to protest the company’s handling of Donald Trump’s social media posts, warned that advertisers also deserve to be questioned.
Currently, they are moderated through a separate team of staff members, and the moderator stated that there was a belief that they are getting a simple trip. “If certain types of speech are not allowed, the fact that other people pay to demonstrate a speech will not make a difference. I know that some time ago I reported classified ads that I think are broken, but that have been omitted.”
Carolyn Everson, vice president of Facebook’s global industry group, said: “We respect the resolution of any logo and stay informed about the vital paintings of the suppression of hate speech and the provision of critical voting information. Our conversations with marketers and civil rights organizations on how they combine can be a force for good.”