Cyber-Proletariat by Nick Dyer-Witheford

Author:Nick Dyer-Witheford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines

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Prelude: The Content Moderator

In an office on the ‘second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila, a woman is watching streams of violent and pornographic imagery pass across her computer screen (Chen 2014). She is working. As the hours of her shift clock down, she swiftly, repeatedly, marks each feed for deletion, acceptance, or further evaluation by the social media company that hires her. Her labour is contracted and insecure. In North America it might be paid $20 an hour, although it is also performed for less; in the Philippines it earns between $500 and $300 a month.

Some 100,000 people around the world perform such ‘Commercial Content Moderation’ (CCM) for social media and digital entertainment companies (Chen 2014). Until recently it was a relatively secret work, hidden by employers reluctant to reveal trade practices and disturb social media’s attractive appearance of direct, spontaneous interpersonal communication; CCM workers are frequently bound by non-disclosure agreements. Yet, as Sarah T. Roberts (2015) makes clear in her groundbreaking study of CCM, this form of digital labour is essential to its corporate employers, for without it their platforms would be deluged with user-generated content so shocking as to repel other users, and perhaps expose companies to litigation. As Roberts shows, CCM is performed in a variety of settings – in-house, outsourced to boutique third-party operators or mass call centres, or as piece-work microlabours. Conditions and wages vary. In general, however, the work is contracted, precarious, ‘low status and low wage’ (Roberts 2015). It is also ‘rote, repetitive, quota-driven, queue based’, and ‘vacillates from the mind numbingly repetitive and mundane’ to abrupt, repeated encounters with ‘violent, disturbing, and at worst, psychologically damaging’ material (Roberts 2015). Employers usually provide little or no assistance to moderators dealing with trauma.

CCM is global work, in a twofold sense. First, it is performed around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to India and Bangladesh. Some companies ‘run dual level operations, sending broad level screening offshore and retaining US workers to assess content that needs culturally specific assessments’ (Chen 2014). There appears to be a growing tendency to seek out low-wage locations. Some aspects of content moderation can be automated – for example the identification of text strings or even of videos showing large expanses of human skin, a likely indicator of pornography, and there are increasing efforts to harness sophisticated artificial intelligences in identification of problem material (Roberts 2015). For the moment, though, human judgements are indispensable, and digital capital strives to cheapen the price of this cognitive and affective labour by the same offshoring process through which industrial capital slashed the costs of factory work.

Second, the content CCM moderators scan comes from around the world: bombings and beheadings from the Middle East, drug war violence from Mexico, spam from Nigeria, pornographic and paedophiliac images from globally exploitative industries, suicidal messages and screams for help from everywhere. And

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