I long time ago, I was operating a "social network" which allowed image uploads. (India local, didn't amount to much as was shutdown.).
Immediately at launch, we started having a huge amount of (image) pron being uploaded into the pages. We put in some rate limits etc, but did not want to put any major restrictions of user signups etc as that would hurt signup figures (important to the ceo!).
We already had some content review people thru a temp agency on site, so we checked with them and they were fine doing this manual filtering of these images for us. All young (early 20s) women. While my team built a quick "dashboard" for them to be able to do this image filtering quickly and conveniently, I had a detailed conversation with them as I was very concerned about having them review this kinda stuff for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Truly nasty stuff.
They were _perfectly_ clear that they had no issues with it, and they told me in so many words to not give it a second thought and to let them get back to work.
It was a surprise, but it was a point of realization: there are much worse things they could be doing. And looking a porn has shock value only the first time. I was under-estimating these women and assuming they were some "snowflakes" who could not deal with something this silly and non-threatening.
It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt by this as "snowflakes" and the content they're exposed to as "silly and non-threatening."
From what you're saying, there's also a big difference between what you were dealing with and what this article is talking about: in your case it was only still images, and only "regular" porn (and I assume they probably had to monitor every image posted if it was "a long time ago" so overall they were not exposed only to that content); in this case they're reviewing videos content including not only porn but also violence and sexual abuse, that was pre-flagged by an AI so with way less rule-abiding content mixed in.
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
The massive over-reaction and pearl-clutching surrounding "seeing stuff on a screen" today is really bizarre. I think Meehl called this kind of thinking in therapy the "spun-glass theory of mind", i.e. that people are so fragile and easy to damage that you have to shelter them from even the mildest of harms. Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. Plus, plenty who grew up in the early era of the internet and who saw shit on 4chan know that seeing horrifying things on a screen does not have to be some kind of trauma. You just reported the post and hid it, and moved on.
And the horror of a thing is not actually solely a property of the thing. Different people are affected differently by different things. People the most upset and making the most grandiose claims about how damaging these things are are often projecting their own weakness / engaging in typical mind fallacy. They would do well to provide data to quantify and/or support their claims of the degree of harm here.
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition?
I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
I actually had a conversation about this with my mom. We were talking about the hotel cleaners in Dubai walking around with toothbrushes to clean the shower which seemed mildly ridiculous to our European eyes.
But we came to the realisation that these folks were probably happy that they could send money back to their villages. And we left a nice tip.
While one can blame corporations, the most blame lands on the Indian government(s). Decades and decades of corrupt local, state, and central governance has led to dire poverty and high levels of unemployment. The current and past leaders have had no care to fix it, and it’s only getting worse. Their incompetence is what creates these kinds of jobs as alternatives to abject poverty and death.
I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.
This person is earning a really competitive wage. She’s getting the power and independence to lead a materially good life. This will trump every other metaphysical concern you can have by watching these abusive videos.
Some one has to moderate these videos and it’s great that it’s someone poor who’s getting the opportunity.
This argument is somewhat true in the small case (e.g. if you are starving and the only job for you is shoveling bodies into a furnace, may as well).
But I think the reason people have a problem is that giant multi-national corps have created a system where shoveling bodies into the furnace is the most profitable option for these desperate people.
The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?"
Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it. Its a complex issue because it was critical work at the time. However, only a little while later, we realize the system we had was broken and poisoning the planet, ourselves, and the workers. I'm sure many coal miners are remiss that they no longer can work the mines, and many companies would be happy to employ them if it was profitable enough, but ultimately its not a good system for anyone. And if I hear that "coal miners in high demand in China" I'm not going to say "oh I'm so glad they have employment" I'm going to ask "why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"
"The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?""
Why is the sole blame on countries other than India. We should be focusing on the government of India and why the system there creates a society with a much larger percentage of poverty than many other parts of the world.
"Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it."
How is this similar? Nobody is dying from looking at terrible content.
"why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"
This article is about the better alternative. They aren't physically risking their lives every day to make a living.
> Why is the sole blame on countries other than India
You can blame India all you want; Modi is very much due for criticism, his political leadership is pitiful and merits no quarter from Western governments or otherwise.
But the Russian Federation doesn't care, they've got crude to process. The Knesset won't convene to denounce their enemy's enemy. The US loves buying cheap oil and siphoning Indian labor. They'll blame India right alongside you all day long, but they won't ever stop supporting their broken system. India's suffered from this for the better part of a century and it's becoming apparent that foreign influence is the issue.
> I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.
I think THIS shows that you've never dealt with people in abject poverty. Just because you live in poverty doesn't mean you lack humanity.
People lie, cheat, steal, sell their bodies and kill to subsist in poverty. Whatever it takes to survive. That is totally separate from the toll that that type of surviving takes.
It is true that employment and pay are good. The question is a) are proper protections in place for workers and b) does pay adequately compensate for traumatic stress. Studying the issue is valuable, particularly given the potential for labor exploitation given the power imbalance between the largest, most powerful organizations in the world and a labor base which as you point out could otherwise be disenfranchised.
I think with this info we can assess whether the wage is indeed competitive. Otherwise claiming "well they're getting paid" can be used to justify exploitative labor practices or negate the need for ethical inquiry.
Also calling psychological harm metaphysical is questionable. Is PTSD experienced by American troops coming back from deployment metaphysical? Not necessarily comparing these cases in degree.
I'm not sure what invoking neocolonialism adds to the discussion. Best to engage on a factual rather than ideological basis.
I generally agree with the broader point you're making, but I also think there's nothing wrong with pointing out how messed up it is that that's the reality of the choice. The whole point of improving society is to eliminate this kind of dilemma
That's verging on a white man's burden kind of argument. We can help tackle global income disparity without telling poorer people that they should be happy we're offering them the jobs we don't want to do ourselves.
We could but we don’t. Like, let’s buy artificial diamonds so kids in the Congo aren’t mining blood diamonds, but you never hear about the follow-up of helping those kids out of poverty. I’m all for ethical sourcing, but we are horrible at the other things we should be doing to alleviate poverty around the world.
I can see why many think that our global social activism would be better redirected at simply making poorer people less poor as opposed to their exploitation. It’s definitely a jaded view though.
Growth in manufacturing products for export, first in wrecked post-war Japan, then in Taiwan, and then in China, is what lifted all of them out of deep poverty into global powerhouses and technology leaders. You better believe that they were happy to have those jobs others didn't want and to capitalize on them to grow themselves.
As long as it doesn't involve just giving them money. This experiment has been done in Africa for as long as I can remember and there's only more poverty and a higher birth rate.
"without telling poorer people that they should be happy we're offering them the jobs we don't want to do ourselves"
A corrupt government is usually the reason a country doesn't prosper. There's no jobs because businesses end up just getting ripped off and move elsewhere (along with anyone smart). What's left is a broken infrastructure and abject poverty.
I think that it is grotesque to take some moral high ground while global companies are exploiting the most desperate workers that they can find. They don’t give a shit about poor people in India, they need people with marginal English language ability whom have little or no worker protections.
People will do what they have to do to survive. But this is hurting these people who long suffer long after the social media company’s contractor discards them.
What’s your alternative? The people in villages are struggling without jobs and they are poor. They don’t even have food to put on their plate.
They make irrational decisions - don’t send their kids to school, make them work in farms. They are mentally stunted because of low quality food. They vote for idiots which stall progress even more.
You show concern but what is the alternative? Ask the capitalists for even more money?
yes, all that profit they are making should be invested into the future of our society. globally.
poor people don't send their kids to school because school costs money, which they don't have. school is an investment into the future. but you can't make an investment if you don't have anything to invest. which is why that investment needs to come from those who have the money.
People who raise these concerns don't understand true poverty. They might have seen it during trips but don't really "grok" it. That's one place where the expression "First world problems" is relevant. Being able to pay for housing, food and some degree of safety is an immense improvement in life quality versus the previous state with poverty and no videos.
I agree with you but disagree with how you phrased your comment. They aren't being threatened, they were either born into poverty/starvation or went into poverty. In their perspective (or at least some of them), they view it as a sacrifice to lead their families into a better life.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have distaste for farming out unpleasant work to poorer countries. But also I think it's perfectly reasonable to accept that it's a fact of life and realise that it's literally redirecting wealth from the richest companies in the world to some of the poorer people in the world.
I'm more bothered by the fact that once again an article focuses on the plight of an identity deemed oppressed rather than broader concern for working classes. All it does is sell it as pandering rather than exposing a genuine issue. And as usual from the post-modern left, dividing rather than uniting. The article's entire justification for this is the absolute cop-out: >Women form half or more of this workforce.
As another example, I read an article the other day complaining about an advertising campaign from a colossal multinational company replacing the "o"s in London tube stop names with "0.0"s. Why? Not because of excessive corporate encroachment into public spaces, but because it might be confusing for disabled people. Maybe it would be, but once again the broader problem of capitalist overreach is ignored in favour of identity. Corporate exploitation is fine as long as it doesn't impact people who aren't able white men
I am a lower caste Indian one generation removed from being farmhands. I have seen my parents go without for decades until I became successful. I still think this is utter cruelty and another way the poor are taken advantage of. Mr Paternal westerner, I reject your false dichotomy.
Watching this stuff all day can literally cause you to have lifelong PTSD. I want poor people to have enough money to provide for themselves, but this is exploitative - they should get paid a LOT more to do this kind of work, the same way someone who does something physically dangerous gets paid more for the risk.
Are you suggesting that the same people in India (the same woman) be employed but be paid, say, 2x her salary and the company would do it out of generosity (2x the market rate).
Im with you... to some extent. I come from parts of the world where there is real material poverty and so this is tangible food on the table and a better life in some sense...at least for her family if not for her.
The question though is why that material poverty exists in so many parts of the world that were once pretty advanced civilizations.... Colonialism def had a part to play there. So the irony isn't lost that western powers exploited and extracted from civilizations and cultures that were different from theirs..all in the name of progress of course..and now those parts of the world are dependent on the breadcrumbs thrown their way by different western powers.
Do they? Maybe you can never get to zero, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any ways to materially reduce the frequency of such videos being uploaded.
Of course, many of these ways will probably affect growth metrics, and since these directly translate into revenue, I can imagine how the economic tradeoff that was made here looks like...
There are other trade offs, requiring a real world id to connect to the Internet and fragmenting it to connect only aligned countries will mostly take away problem of illegal porn, fraud and spam. But at some cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'metaphysical' here, but I get the impression that you're dismissively trivializing real psychological problems by using that word.
An improvement in material conditions does not straightforwardly make up for these problems. What if they cause the viewer to commit suicide, or be so distraught they can no longer continue to work? People who do this work tend not to be able to do it for very long.
You also seem to be evaluating this by taking the current order of things for granted, as if it were not possible for this kind of thing to not be necessary in the first place. Quite a stunted imagination.
_you_ don’t know what it means to be under material poverty.
Look up farmer suicides in India an you can understand how material poverty leads to even more suicides statistically.
These people don’t even have food to sustain. One of the biggest problems is that poor people in India have low IQ because they literally can’t afford food with vitamins.
Low IQ leads to irrational decisions, low productivity and they get equal vote so they vote in idiots that slow progress.
These jobs are the best deal for overall progress of India. Sure they have to struggle in the middle but at least they have good food on the plate. Some safety net to make long term decisions and vote for better leaders.
You wouldn’t get it. You would just show concern. But Indians have to deal with the problems.
I know what it means to be under material poverty in this hell of a country. Even so I think this is another poisoned chalice. We are where you export your garbage to, whether material or digital. I spit on your false charity.
_you_ don't seem to understand what I wrote, or are not attempting to genuinely respond to it. But you've demonstrated a certain thickheadedness, potentially willful, so I can't say I was expecting better.
how privileged of you! thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you while you centralize my brain power and start charging me a tax on thinking. GTH
I was not big fan of Liveleak, but I really enjoyed WatchPeopleDie community, one could learn a lot in the comments about how to be safer in the enviroment (I'm aware they moved to website, but it's not same anymore, too much friction to visit it)
after being the regular visitor of WPD I stand at the junction waiting for my turn shielded by the traffic lights pole and always look in the eye of the driver when crossing the road, especially if it's tall truck
some ppl don't realize how many lives actually WPD saved, but hey now we have victory nobody is exposed to this disturbing content and making silly jokes about death, right?
This is obviously a flippant comment that shouldn't be taken seriously. But the loss of LiveLeak seems like the loss of the journalism that the Internet was supposed to bring. There were a lot of odd things posted on there with some unneeded commentary but it was a place that would post unfiltered content that other places were scared to post. A lot of it was disgusting that I wouldn't watch, but it's weird to think that the Internet is censored now in a way where it's hard to even find it.
You can find areas of propaganda where site rule breaking will be allowed if it serves the interest of the owner, but you really have to seek it out. It's even weirder that the latest generation is self censoring common words so they can show up on sites like TikTok. Billionaires buying newspapers to censor seems less strange but sadly something I also didn't expect.
When I was in my 20s I worked for a well-known global telco. In our office, we had a group of people whose literal job was watching streaming porn from around the world all day. They had walls of screens running simultaneously.
Those streams were customers. Our people’s job was to monitor the streams for video and audio quality issues. When I would tell my friends that I worked with guys who’s literal job was watching porn on a sofa all day, they thought it must be the best job in the world.
But when I talked to the guys that actually had the job, they said it was a terribly boring chore. Even worse, they said you quickly become so desensitized that it bled over into their non-work life in a negative way. Almost everyone that had that job eventually grew to hate it.
These kinds of jobs have always existed. To some extent someone needs to do it. While we may be outsourcing it now, there is a long history of paying people in the US to do it.
It's a well compensated job vs local opportunities but feels like it should be an extravagantly compensated job vs local opportunities. Someone has to do it, but also somewhere along the continuum of doing factory garment work for $100 and deep sea welding for $100k, it feels like this should be closer to latter.
Seems like kind of job that needs physical filtering. Onboard bunch of candidates, measure their vitals, find low responders to abusive stimulus, hire them. I'm sure there's some poorly replicated psych study done on 1st years to draw from.
I see a contradiction. If they are not responsive, their psyche is safe and there are no reasons for them to be compensated much more than minimum wage workers.
"Safer" - I think essentially filtering for 1-2% of population high on sociopathy / anti social spectrum. Doesn't mean they're immune, just better equipped for job cognitively. I surmise compensation goes up when weeding out 98% of population.
I get why a firefighter may be asked to take risks to save lives. We should not ask these women to take these risks so that billionaires can become trillionaires.
This is not new. The British boast of banning slavery but they will never tell you about their invention of bonded labour. They imported bonded labour to South Africa, Guyana and other parts of their empire.
Now companies can use the Internet to keep the labour remote. Doesn't even require a degree.
No one should have to do this job. And if you can't make your social network function or AI thing function without it, then maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't have that social network or AI thing.
I had the same thought. I think the job is unavoidable BUT it needs much better screening. There are already countless of mindless individual who love watching that content, why not hire them? Finally a job sex offenders are good at.
It could also be a Clockwork Orange therapy for them.
The onus should be on the job provider to care for their employees too. They have a responsibility to ensure their employees are not physically harmed while they work. And to help or compensate their workers for any work injury. Right? Why not use the same criteria for psychological harm too? They should be provided psychological counselling. And note that this is not a new industry.
You're thinking US. What happens when most of the world doesn't even have an ID? Does Facebook suddenly drop 80% of users? Do US Facebook users only see US content?
The internet is not only "the west." What you're thinking is what's already happening in the Chinese internet, and even they cannot really limit the amount of disgusting content released by Chinese websites.
As long as non-verified users have access to the same internet as you, that content will continue to exist.
How do humans with very little exposure to grotesque violence or extreme content universally label such content so well? This is not graduate level data that needs labeling.
What is missing in an AI model for it to intuitively understand what content is extreme from very few labeled sample in training?
> Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state
> With just four months left on her contract, which pays about £260 a month
Earning US$350/mo working remotely in a village in one of the poorest states in India is an extremely competitive given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast fashion for Zara earning US$130-150/mo [0], doing bit piece ag labor for around US$100/mo and participating in MGNREGA for US$50/mo, become a housewife, or become a Naxalite/Maoist insurgent to earn a couple thousand dollars when surrendering [1].
Content moderation means interacting with extremely depressing and horrid content, but someone needs to do it, and once models get good enough we would start seeing articles about how "all the good 100% remote first jobs with no barrier to entry" are being automated to oblivion.
Yes it sucks, but the alternative is becoming a migrant worker or working in light manufacturing where QoL is worse. Heck, we used to see similar articles about Chinese workers for Apple barely 14 years ago in then equally poor Sichuan [2], but you don't see those kinds of articles anymore.
Development takes time and the fact that US$350/mo remote data annotation and content moderation jobs are now penetrating into villages in what used to be the Naxalite/Maoist/Red Corridor where bombings and gun battles were a part of normal life just 10 years ago [3] is a massive step up developmentally - it means that there is robust enough internet, literacy, banking, and public services penetration for the seeds for a services economy to form.
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes westerners - my family is from these kinds of villages in India and Vietnam. The alternatives are extremely bleak - especially for a tribal woman like Ms Murmu at the bottom of the social and patriarchal hierarchy.
>>given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast ...
That is the best case scenario. Mostly women roll beedis(a kind of needle sized cigar) on which you get like 1 paise per 10 rolls or something like that. Or worse do assorted labor chores which can really sap one's soul real fast.
Even with all that women actually have it a lot better than men. Men literally die and are reborn every day in most parts of India.
Just drive 30 kms North of Bangalore, and you will see abject poverty scenes. People scavenging bovine dung for fuel, children with flies, no clothing. The ever present scene is always that of an elderly person with pencil thin legs wearing shorts he likely is wearing since a decade with nothing but boiled rice and salt water+turmeric to eat daily. 8 - 10 hr power cuts are the norm, that is if you can afford electricity at all. Most health care is either entirely absent, or you have to travel to the nearest metro and hope you don't die out of hunger getting treatment there. I could go on but that is life here.
£260 a month is actually great for some place like this.
Jharkhand was formerly part of Bihar >25 years ago, and they were administered jointly with Orissa before independence. Then, my family worked in the police service and were transferred between Patna and Hazaribagh without any problem.
> I see few people coming from Jharkhand and working as waitresses in my state
Ststistically, a young Santali woman from rural Jharkhand would most likely end up working in West Bengal, Maharashtra, or Karnataka [0] according to Jharkhand's Migration Survey.
> Also, your first link mentions Bihar not Jharkhand
Because HDI and developmental indicators remain roughly comparable in both states. Salaries in Bihar are comparable to salaries for similar roles in Jharkhand, Eastern UP, or Northern portions of West Bengal.
The alternatives in these kinds of villages in rural Jharkhand's tribal and red corridor are literally
1.) bit-piece agriculture work for the local landlord who will never pay salaries on time because he has the power
2.) migrate to the nearest big city (in this case Ranchi, Dhanbad, or Patna) and work at a factory for 12 hours a week with the exact same risks
3.) get married off
4.) join a Maoist outfit in order to surrender and get government rehabilitation benefits.
And all of this is assuming the men (and it's always men) who they are reporting to are not lecherous abusers which is a very real risk in these kinds of jobs for women in Ms Murmu's status.
Like out of all the bad options, this is the least bad one - especially in an area that was a warzone barely a decade ago.
Eww. Like 19th c. children in dangerous factories, abusing poor people's mental health sifting through the Global North's cavalcade of depravity. There must exist more productive and honest uses of people's time, and some jobs shouldn't be done for any amount of money. Some jobs done risky ways shouldn't be done by human beings at all in dangerous manners (coal mining without safety equipment, loom maintenance while running, carrying sulfur chunks out of active volcanoes) because they lower us all. "But they're making money" is not a good enough excuse because that's a false choice as there infinitely other activities, and any number of safer activities or similar tasks done with meaningful precautions are needed, desirable, and could be done instead.
That's false. We expect that jobs are growing at both ends of the income distribution with AI [0][1] - yes there are a ton of data annotators and content moderators now, but literally the overwhelming majority of us also expect to see an expansion in standard SWE and SWE adjacent roles with AI/ML vibe coding becoming the norm.
The reason you are facing job losses right now is because Joe in Cary who learnt to code at a bootcamp can't justify being paid $180k a year when I can hire Jan for $90k in Karlin [2] or Jamila for $60k in Koramangla [3] while maintaining equivalent performance and output. Having a president pass an executive order to distract from the Gold Card announcement [4] also played a role [5] just like we warned would happen.
I long time ago, I was operating a "social network" which allowed image uploads. (India local, didn't amount to much as was shutdown.).
Immediately at launch, we started having a huge amount of (image) pron being uploaded into the pages. We put in some rate limits etc, but did not want to put any major restrictions of user signups etc as that would hurt signup figures (important to the ceo!).
We already had some content review people thru a temp agency on site, so we checked with them and they were fine doing this manual filtering of these images for us. All young (early 20s) women. While my team built a quick "dashboard" for them to be able to do this image filtering quickly and conveniently, I had a detailed conversation with them as I was very concerned about having them review this kinda stuff for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Truly nasty stuff.
They were _perfectly_ clear that they had no issues with it, and they told me in so many words to not give it a second thought and to let them get back to work.
It was a surprise, but it was a point of realization: there are much worse things they could be doing. And looking a porn has shock value only the first time. I was under-estimating these women and assuming they were some "snowflakes" who could not deal with something this silly and non-threatening.
Just my own person anec-data.
It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt by this as "snowflakes" and the content they're exposed to as "silly and non-threatening." From what you're saying, there's also a big difference between what you were dealing with and what this article is talking about: in your case it was only still images, and only "regular" porn (and I assume they probably had to monitor every image posted if it was "a long time ago" so overall they were not exposed only to that content); in this case they're reviewing videos content including not only porn but also violence and sexual abuse, that was pre-flagged by an AI so with way less rule-abiding content mixed in.
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
The massive over-reaction and pearl-clutching surrounding "seeing stuff on a screen" today is really bizarre. I think Meehl called this kind of thinking in therapy the "spun-glass theory of mind", i.e. that people are so fragile and easy to damage that you have to shelter them from even the mildest of harms. Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. Plus, plenty who grew up in the early era of the internet and who saw shit on 4chan know that seeing horrifying things on a screen does not have to be some kind of trauma. You just reported the post and hid it, and moved on.
And the horror of a thing is not actually solely a property of the thing. Different people are affected differently by different things. People the most upset and making the most grandiose claims about how damaging these things are are often projecting their own weakness / engaging in typical mind fallacy. They would do well to provide data to quantify and/or support their claims of the degree of harm here.
The alternative is…. They don’t have a job?
What else is going to happen?
For many people, the alternatives can literally be death, wading unprotected through human excrement, sold into defacto slavery, etc. etc.
AI can do some of it (now), but largely isn’t going to be more accurate and still needs humans to double check its work.
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition?
I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
I actually had a conversation about this with my mom. We were talking about the hotel cleaners in Dubai walking around with toothbrushes to clean the shower which seemed mildly ridiculous to our European eyes.
But we came to the realisation that these folks were probably happy that they could send money back to their villages. And we left a nice tip.
There is plenty of productive work to do in the world that isn’t streaming through the dregs of the internet for hours on end.
This argument is a false dichotomy.
It's modern slavery.
Just because it's beneficial for them doesn't mean they are getting exploited.
Looking at porn or something similar or actually really bad , changes people.
Even if it means they get a lot more insensitive
While one can blame corporations, the most blame lands on the Indian government(s). Decades and decades of corrupt local, state, and central governance has led to dire poverty and high levels of unemployment. The current and past leaders have had no care to fix it, and it’s only getting worse. Their incompetence is what creates these kinds of jobs as alternatives to abject poverty and death.
I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.
This person is earning a really competitive wage. She’s getting the power and independence to lead a materially good life. This will trump every other metaphysical concern you can have by watching these abusive videos.
Some one has to moderate these videos and it’s great that it’s someone poor who’s getting the opportunity.
This argument is somewhat true in the small case (e.g. if you are starving and the only job for you is shoveling bodies into a furnace, may as well).
But I think the reason people have a problem is that giant multi-national corps have created a system where shoveling bodies into the furnace is the most profitable option for these desperate people.
The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?"
Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it. Its a complex issue because it was critical work at the time. However, only a little while later, we realize the system we had was broken and poisoning the planet, ourselves, and the workers. I'm sure many coal miners are remiss that they no longer can work the mines, and many companies would be happy to employ them if it was profitable enough, but ultimately its not a good system for anyone. And if I hear that "coal miners in high demand in China" I'm not going to say "oh I'm so glad they have employment" I'm going to ask "why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"
>> giant multi-national corps have created a system where
they didnt do by intention - "market forces" drove them there to do this, i.e. competition / costs etc.
"The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?""
Why is the sole blame on countries other than India. We should be focusing on the government of India and why the system there creates a society with a much larger percentage of poverty than many other parts of the world.
"Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it."
How is this similar? Nobody is dying from looking at terrible content.
"why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"
This article is about the better alternative. They aren't physically risking their lives every day to make a living.
> Why is the sole blame on countries other than India
You can blame India all you want; Modi is very much due for criticism, his political leadership is pitiful and merits no quarter from Western governments or otherwise.
But the Russian Federation doesn't care, they've got crude to process. The Knesset won't convene to denounce their enemy's enemy. The US loves buying cheap oil and siphoning Indian labor. They'll blame India right alongside you all day long, but they won't ever stop supporting their broken system. India's suffered from this for the better part of a century and it's becoming apparent that foreign influence is the issue.
> I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.
I think THIS shows that you've never dealt with people in abject poverty. Just because you live in poverty doesn't mean you lack humanity.
People lie, cheat, steal, sell their bodies and kill to subsist in poverty. Whatever it takes to survive. That is totally separate from the toll that that type of surviving takes.
It is true that employment and pay are good. The question is a) are proper protections in place for workers and b) does pay adequately compensate for traumatic stress. Studying the issue is valuable, particularly given the potential for labor exploitation given the power imbalance between the largest, most powerful organizations in the world and a labor base which as you point out could otherwise be disenfranchised.
I think with this info we can assess whether the wage is indeed competitive. Otherwise claiming "well they're getting paid" can be used to justify exploitative labor practices or negate the need for ethical inquiry.
Also calling psychological harm metaphysical is questionable. Is PTSD experienced by American troops coming back from deployment metaphysical? Not necessarily comparing these cases in degree.
I'm not sure what invoking neocolonialism adds to the discussion. Best to engage on a factual rather than ideological basis.
I generally agree with the broader point you're making, but I also think there's nothing wrong with pointing out how messed up it is that that's the reality of the choice. The whole point of improving society is to eliminate this kind of dilemma
It’s messed up that this has to be done. But overall positive change.
Why does it have to be done?
That's verging on a white man's burden kind of argument. We can help tackle global income disparity without telling poorer people that they should be happy we're offering them the jobs we don't want to do ourselves.
We could but we don’t. Like, let’s buy artificial diamonds so kids in the Congo aren’t mining blood diamonds, but you never hear about the follow-up of helping those kids out of poverty. I’m all for ethical sourcing, but we are horrible at the other things we should be doing to alleviate poverty around the world.
I can see why many think that our global social activism would be better redirected at simply making poorer people less poor as opposed to their exploitation. It’s definitely a jaded view though.
Growth in manufacturing products for export, first in wrecked post-war Japan, then in Taiwan, and then in China, is what lifted all of them out of deep poverty into global powerhouses and technology leaders. You better believe that they were happy to have those jobs others didn't want and to capitalize on them to grow themselves.
"We can help tackle global income disparity "
As long as it doesn't involve just giving them money. This experiment has been done in Africa for as long as I can remember and there's only more poverty and a higher birth rate.
"without telling poorer people that they should be happy we're offering them the jobs we don't want to do ourselves"
A corrupt government is usually the reason a country doesn't prosper. There's no jobs because businesses end up just getting ripped off and move elsewhere (along with anyone smart). What's left is a broken infrastructure and abject poverty.
Until this is fixed, things will never change.
I think that it is grotesque to take some moral high ground while global companies are exploiting the most desperate workers that they can find. They don’t give a shit about poor people in India, they need people with marginal English language ability whom have little or no worker protections.
People will do what they have to do to survive. But this is hurting these people who long suffer long after the social media company’s contractor discards them.
They might also be doing it for the sake of a better future for their children, not just for themselves.
What’s your alternative? The people in villages are struggling without jobs and they are poor. They don’t even have food to put on their plate.
They make irrational decisions - don’t send their kids to school, make them work in farms. They are mentally stunted because of low quality food. They vote for idiots which stall progress even more.
You show concern but what is the alternative? Ask the capitalists for even more money?
Ending world hunger isn’t that expensive: https://wfpusa.org/news/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-...
Nvidia’s profit alone would’ve been more than enough to end world hunger by these estimates.
Ask the capitalists for even more money?
yes, all that profit they are making should be invested into the future of our society. globally.
poor people don't send their kids to school because school costs money, which they don't have. school is an investment into the future. but you can't make an investment if you don't have anything to invest. which is why that investment needs to come from those who have the money.
You sound like Johnathan Swift satirically suggesting that the Irish sell their children to be eaten by their landlords.
People who raise these concerns don't understand true poverty. They might have seen it during trips but don't really "grok" it. That's one place where the expression "First world problems" is relevant. Being able to pay for housing, food and some degree of safety is an immense improvement in life quality versus the previous state with poverty and no videos.
Maybe it's that we don't think people should be threatened with starvation to force them to perform degrading labor.
I agree with you but disagree with how you phrased your comment. They aren't being threatened, they were either born into poverty/starvation or went into poverty. In their perspective (or at least some of them), they view it as a sacrifice to lead their families into a better life.
They aren’t being threatened. They are already starving and this is giving them an opportunity out.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have distaste for farming out unpleasant work to poorer countries. But also I think it's perfectly reasonable to accept that it's a fact of life and realise that it's literally redirecting wealth from the richest companies in the world to some of the poorer people in the world.
I'm more bothered by the fact that once again an article focuses on the plight of an identity deemed oppressed rather than broader concern for working classes. All it does is sell it as pandering rather than exposing a genuine issue. And as usual from the post-modern left, dividing rather than uniting. The article's entire justification for this is the absolute cop-out: >Women form half or more of this workforce.
As another example, I read an article the other day complaining about an advertising campaign from a colossal multinational company replacing the "o"s in London tube stop names with "0.0"s. Why? Not because of excessive corporate encroachment into public spaces, but because it might be confusing for disabled people. Maybe it would be, but once again the broader problem of capitalist overreach is ignored in favour of identity. Corporate exploitation is fine as long as it doesn't impact people who aren't able white men
Maybe we can hold hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya.
That would be as helpful as these vacuous takes.
I am a lower caste Indian one generation removed from being farmhands. I have seen my parents go without for decades until I became successful. I still think this is utter cruelty and another way the poor are taken advantage of. Mr Paternal westerner, I reject your false dichotomy.
Watching this stuff all day can literally cause you to have lifelong PTSD. I want poor people to have enough money to provide for themselves, but this is exploitative - they should get paid a LOT more to do this kind of work, the same way someone who does something physically dangerous gets paid more for the risk.
Are you suggesting that the same people in India (the same woman) be employed but be paid, say, 2x her salary and the company would do it out of generosity (2x the market rate).
Im with you... to some extent. I come from parts of the world where there is real material poverty and so this is tangible food on the table and a better life in some sense...at least for her family if not for her.
The question though is why that material poverty exists in so many parts of the world that were once pretty advanced civilizations.... Colonialism def had a part to play there. So the irony isn't lost that western powers exploited and extracted from civilizations and cultures that were different from theirs..all in the name of progress of course..and now those parts of the world are dependent on the breadcrumbs thrown their way by different western powers.
> Some one has to moderate these videos
Do they? Maybe you can never get to zero, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any ways to materially reduce the frequency of such videos being uploaded.
Of course, many of these ways will probably affect growth metrics, and since these directly translate into revenue, I can imagine how the economic tradeoff that was made here looks like...
There are other trade offs, requiring a real world id to connect to the Internet and fragmenting it to connect only aligned countries will mostly take away problem of illegal porn, fraud and spam. But at some cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'metaphysical' here, but I get the impression that you're dismissively trivializing real psychological problems by using that word.
An improvement in material conditions does not straightforwardly make up for these problems. What if they cause the viewer to commit suicide, or be so distraught they can no longer continue to work? People who do this work tend not to be able to do it for very long.
You also seem to be evaluating this by taking the current order of things for granted, as if it were not possible for this kind of thing to not be necessary in the first place. Quite a stunted imagination.
_you_ don’t know what it means to be under material poverty.
Look up farmer suicides in India an you can understand how material poverty leads to even more suicides statistically.
These people don’t even have food to sustain. One of the biggest problems is that poor people in India have low IQ because they literally can’t afford food with vitamins.
Low IQ leads to irrational decisions, low productivity and they get equal vote so they vote in idiots that slow progress.
These jobs are the best deal for overall progress of India. Sure they have to struggle in the middle but at least they have good food on the plate. Some safety net to make long term decisions and vote for better leaders.
You wouldn’t get it. You would just show concern. But Indians have to deal with the problems.
I know what it means to be under material poverty in this hell of a country. Even so I think this is another poisoned chalice. We are where you export your garbage to, whether material or digital. I spit on your false charity.
_you_ don't seem to understand what I wrote, or are not attempting to genuinely respond to it. But you've demonstrated a certain thickheadedness, potentially willful, so I can't say I was expecting better.
Yeah, let's save these poor women by taking their jobs away...
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how privileged of you! thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you while you centralize my brain power and start charging me a tax on thinking. GTH
I remember watching this kind of content for free on Liveleak back in the day.
Maybe they should get edgy teenagers to do the content classification rather than third-world rural women with minimal media exposure.
I was not big fan of Liveleak, but I really enjoyed WatchPeopleDie community, one could learn a lot in the comments about how to be safer in the enviroment (I'm aware they moved to website, but it's not same anymore, too much friction to visit it)
after being the regular visitor of WPD I stand at the junction waiting for my turn shielded by the traffic lights pole and always look in the eye of the driver when crossing the road, especially if it's tall truck
some ppl don't realize how many lives actually WPD saved, but hey now we have victory nobody is exposed to this disturbing content and making silly jokes about death, right?
I actually agree with this, I was a weekly WPD user and it was downright educational.
This is obviously a flippant comment that shouldn't be taken seriously. But the loss of LiveLeak seems like the loss of the journalism that the Internet was supposed to bring. There were a lot of odd things posted on there with some unneeded commentary but it was a place that would post unfiltered content that other places were scared to post. A lot of it was disgusting that I wouldn't watch, but it's weird to think that the Internet is censored now in a way where it's hard to even find it.
You can find areas of propaganda where site rule breaking will be allowed if it serves the interest of the owner, but you really have to seek it out. It's even weirder that the latest generation is self censoring common words so they can show up on sites like TikTok. Billionaires buying newspapers to censor seems less strange but sadly something I also didn't expect.
Blame Visa and Mastercard and the puritanical-when-it's-convenient media
When I was in my 20s I worked for a well-known global telco. In our office, we had a group of people whose literal job was watching streaming porn from around the world all day. They had walls of screens running simultaneously.
Those streams were customers. Our people’s job was to monitor the streams for video and audio quality issues. When I would tell my friends that I worked with guys who’s literal job was watching porn on a sofa all day, they thought it must be the best job in the world.
But when I talked to the guys that actually had the job, they said it was a terribly boring chore. Even worse, they said you quickly become so desensitized that it bled over into their non-work life in a negative way. Almost everyone that had that job eventually grew to hate it.
These kinds of jobs have always existed. To some extent someone needs to do it. While we may be outsourcing it now, there is a long history of paying people in the US to do it.
I can only imagine that watching abuse/porn all day long may cause a person to change- possibly even lead to suicide.
> Sometimes, when I’m with my partner, I feel like a stranger in my own body. I want closeness, but my mind keeps pulling away.
Dissociation. A classic sign of trauma and PTSD.
None of the tech companies really want to moderate. Not because free peaches but because it costs a metric ton of money.
It's a well compensated job vs local opportunities but feels like it should be an extravagantly compensated job vs local opportunities. Someone has to do it, but also somewhere along the continuum of doing factory garment work for $100 and deep sea welding for $100k, it feels like this should be closer to latter.
Seems like kind of job that needs physical filtering. Onboard bunch of candidates, measure their vitals, find low responders to abusive stimulus, hire them. I'm sure there's some poorly replicated psych study done on 1st years to draw from.
I see a contradiction. If they are not responsive, their psyche is safe and there are no reasons for them to be compensated much more than minimum wage workers.
"Safer" - I think essentially filtering for 1-2% of population high on sociopathy / anti social spectrum. Doesn't mean they're immune, just better equipped for job cognitively. I surmise compensation goes up when weeding out 98% of population.
This is an absolutely horrific thing to make a person do. I see comments that say "well someone needs to do it." Then why not volunteer?
They are volunteering! They need the money.
I imagine myself as the one paying someone to do horrible things and uttering this line, and it makes me shudder.
Yes, also this region was ravaged my violent communists (Maoists) not so long ago. So they have very few opportunities.
I get why a firefighter may be asked to take risks to save lives. We should not ask these women to take these risks so that billionaires can become trillionaires.
Who is making them work this job?
Mr Poverty and Ms Hunger
This is not new. The British boast of banning slavery but they will never tell you about their invention of bonded labour. They imported bonded labour to South Africa, Guyana and other parts of their empire.
Now companies can use the Internet to keep the labour remote. Doesn't even require a degree.
No one should have to do this job. And if you can't make your social network function or AI thing function without it, then maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't have that social network or AI thing.
Is there a solution to this?
Let's say these jobs are bad. What do we do then? Just not have people do this job? Not allow uploads?
I had the same thought. I think the job is unavoidable BUT it needs much better screening. There are already countless of mindless individual who love watching that content, why not hire them? Finally a job sex offenders are good at.
It could also be a Clockwork Orange therapy for them.
If the choice is let's have [facebook|linkedin|bluesky] and someone has to suffer like this, or we don't have those things, than let's not have them.
The onus should be on the job provider to care for their employees too. They have a responsibility to ensure their employees are not physically harmed while they work. And to help or compensate their workers for any work injury. Right? Why not use the same criteria for psychological harm too? They should be provided psychological counselling. And note that this is not a new industry.
RealID + Ban + Legal Enforcement (depending on the content)
It will cut this work down by 90%, but I doubt many people here will go for it.
I think that would require someone looking at the content.
You're thinking US. What happens when most of the world doesn't even have an ID? Does Facebook suddenly drop 80% of users? Do US Facebook users only see US content?
The internet is not only "the west." What you're thinking is what's already happening in the Chinese internet, and even they cannot really limit the amount of disgusting content released by Chinese websites.
As long as non-verified users have access to the same internet as you, that content will continue to exist.
How do humans with very little exposure to grotesque violence or extreme content universally label such content so well? This is not graduate level data that needs labeling.
What is missing in an AI model for it to intuitively understand what content is extreme from very few labeled sample in training?
A finely tuned set of heuristic triggers for fear, horror, disgust, etc. You might as well ask why pain is so painful.
> Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state
> With just four months left on her contract, which pays about £260 a month
Earning US$350/mo working remotely in a village in one of the poorest states in India is an extremely competitive given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast fashion for Zara earning US$130-150/mo [0], doing bit piece ag labor for around US$100/mo and participating in MGNREGA for US$50/mo, become a housewife, or become a Naxalite/Maoist insurgent to earn a couple thousand dollars when surrendering [1].
Content moderation means interacting with extremely depressing and horrid content, but someone needs to do it, and once models get good enough we would start seeing articles about how "all the good 100% remote first jobs with no barrier to entry" are being automated to oblivion.
Yes it sucks, but the alternative is becoming a migrant worker or working in light manufacturing where QoL is worse. Heck, we used to see similar articles about Chinese workers for Apple barely 14 years ago in then equally poor Sichuan [2], but you don't see those kinds of articles anymore.
Development takes time and the fact that US$350/mo remote data annotation and content moderation jobs are now penetrating into villages in what used to be the Naxalite/Maoist/Red Corridor where bombings and gun battles were a part of normal life just 10 years ago [3] is a massive step up developmentally - it means that there is robust enough internet, literacy, banking, and public services penetration for the seeds for a services economy to form.
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes westerners - my family is from these kinds of villages in India and Vietnam. The alternatives are extremely bleak - especially for a tribal woman like Ms Murmu at the bottom of the social and patriarchal hierarchy.
[0] - https://theprint.in/ground-reports/industries-finally-return...
[1] - https://www.thehansindia.com/news/national/18-yr-old-maoist-...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-...
[3] - https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/Nov/23/six-maoi...
>>given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast ...
That is the best case scenario. Mostly women roll beedis(a kind of needle sized cigar) on which you get like 1 paise per 10 rolls or something like that. Or worse do assorted labor chores which can really sap one's soul real fast.
Even with all that women actually have it a lot better than men. Men literally die and are reborn every day in most parts of India.
Just drive 30 kms North of Bangalore, and you will see abject poverty scenes. People scavenging bovine dung for fuel, children with flies, no clothing. The ever present scene is always that of an elderly person with pencil thin legs wearing shorts he likely is wearing since a decade with nothing but boiled rice and salt water+turmeric to eat daily. 8 - 10 hr power cuts are the norm, that is if you can afford electricity at all. Most health care is either entirely absent, or you have to travel to the nearest metro and hope you don't die out of hunger getting treatment there. I could go on but that is life here.
£260 a month is actually great for some place like this.
I agree with you completely, but I'm confused by this phrase?
>Men literally die and are reborn every day in most parts of India.
I see few people coming from Jharkhand and working as waitresses in my state.
Also, your first link mentions Bihar not Jharkhand.
Jharkhand was formerly part of Bihar >25 years ago, and they were administered jointly with Orissa before independence. Then, my family worked in the police service and were transferred between Patna and Hazaribagh without any problem.
> I see few people coming from Jharkhand and working as waitresses in my state
Ststistically, a young Santali woman from rural Jharkhand would most likely end up working in West Bengal, Maharashtra, or Karnataka [0] according to Jharkhand's Migration Survey.
> Also, your first link mentions Bihar not Jharkhand
Because HDI and developmental indicators remain roughly comparable in both states. Salaries in Bihar are comparable to salaries for similar roles in Jharkhand, Eastern UP, or Northern portions of West Bengal.
[0] - https://iimad.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/salx20170525s-i...
Yeah what’s the alternative to moderation…no moderation?
There is an argument.
but maybe you have an idea of how manual labor feels (people always do some of it) but no idea how this type of horror feels and what it does.
The alternatives in these kinds of villages in rural Jharkhand's tribal and red corridor are literally
1.) bit-piece agriculture work for the local landlord who will never pay salaries on time because he has the power
2.) migrate to the nearest big city (in this case Ranchi, Dhanbad, or Patna) and work at a factory for 12 hours a week with the exact same risks
3.) get married off
4.) join a Maoist outfit in order to surrender and get government rehabilitation benefits.
And all of this is assuming the men (and it's always men) who they are reporting to are not lecherous abusers which is a very real risk in these kinds of jobs for women in Ms Murmu's status.
Like out of all the bad options, this is the least bad one - especially in an area that was a warzone barely a decade ago.
Eww. Like 19th c. children in dangerous factories, abusing poor people's mental health sifting through the Global North's cavalcade of depravity. There must exist more productive and honest uses of people's time, and some jobs shouldn't be done for any amount of money. Some jobs done risky ways shouldn't be done by human beings at all in dangerous manners (coal mining without safety equipment, loom maintenance while running, carrying sulfur chunks out of active volcanoes) because they lower us all. "But they're making money" is not a good enough excuse because that's a false choice as there infinitely other activities, and any number of safer activities or similar tasks done with meaningful precautions are needed, desirable, and could be done instead.
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When VCs and investors keep saying 'There will be new jobs', they never tell you exactly what they are - on purpose.
Now we know that it is actually being a data labeller, AI tutor and content moderator, but in very low wage countries such as in India.
This is the post-AGI reality. 'Abundance', but not for you.
That's false. We expect that jobs are growing at both ends of the income distribution with AI [0][1] - yes there are a ton of data annotators and content moderators now, but literally the overwhelming majority of us also expect to see an expansion in standard SWE and SWE adjacent roles with AI/ML vibe coding becoming the norm.
The reason you are facing job losses right now is because Joe in Cary who learnt to code at a bootcamp can't justify being paid $180k a year when I can hire Jan for $90k in Karlin [2] or Jamila for $60k in Koramangla [3] while maintaining equivalent performance and output. Having a president pass an executive order to distract from the Gold Card announcement [4] also played a role [5] just like we warned would happen.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/267037e8-a71f-4025-acca-f441fe712...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/d6fdc04f-85cf-4358-a686-298c3de0e...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/prague-...
[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
[4] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-03/alphabet-...