<unlike-us> Inside Facebook’s moderation hub in Athens | Special Report | ekathimerini.com

[José María Mateos]

http://www.ekathimerini.com/246279/gallery/ekathimerini/special-report/inside-facebooks-moderation-hub-in-athens

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For months, Tassos was banned from speaking about his job in the 
southern Athens suburb of Moschato. His task was determining whether 
content put up on Facebook should be removed. In the few seconds until 
the next post would pop up on his screen, he would feel his chest 
tightening. If he had the slightest doubt about his judgment, he had to 
consult an online rulebook indicating the crudest violations of 
community standards. There, he would encounter imagery of hard-core porn 
and animal torture. “I can still recall a picture depicting two little 
dogs that were hung from their front feet,” Tassos told Kathimerini. But 
the line between inappropriate content and censorship was not always 
clear to him. “The guidelines set by Facebook were nebulous and the 
phrasing was sloppy. We often did not know whether we were making the 
right call,” he said.

Tassos was one of the hundreds of Teleperformance employees that work in 
Athens as content moderators for Facebook. These people determine what 
is inappropriate or misleading and needs to be deleted from the 
platform. Unlike so-called “cleaners” in other parts of the world, the 
Athens-based staff do not moderate controversial content shared by users 
on Facebook as personal posts, but only ads. During training, Tassos was 
told that, besides Greece, Facebook ran two more Business Integrity 
teams, in Portugal and Malaysia.
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Cheers,

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José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org/