Tonight I read a two-part saga on the lives of Facebook content moderators.

It's a sobering read.

I can only hope that Newton will report once again after the measures are instituted. Even though there will always be vile content that will have to be moderated by someone (even in the case AI takes over, in which case the AI's decisions will have to be checked at least sporadically) as inherently there will be some humans who take perverse pleasure in hurting others, be they human or not, and enjoy sharing such acts, I cannot put into words the state the current moderators are subjected to.

Not even talking about the vile content itself. I feel like I have slightly too vivid of an imagination to even pay attention to the paragraphs where they talk about what kind of content is even being seen by the moderators. I can't even begin to imagine what being one must be like.

I like Speagle's idea of needing to shut down Facebook (admittedly I agree for the wrong reasons) yet that wouldn't fix the problem, just move it elsewhere. Perhaps the policies were slightly incorrectly skewed which made this entire system even possible in the first place, but the kinds of people that wish to share this content at all will not go away just because you take away their place of expression; they'll just move elsewhere, and that "elsewhere" will have to deal with much the same problems.

I guess the grim conclusion of this supposedly short-form post is that this is how I lose evermore hope in humanity.