FEBRUARY 17, 2012 TIM VISITED 110 TIMES , 2 VISITS TODAY
Facebook Uses an Army of Third World Moderators to Wade Through Flagged Content
There is often a thick veil of secrecy regarding the inner workings and backend machinery of Facebook and especially Facebook Security. This really isn’t surprising – the less that hackers and scammers know about Facebook’s internal processes and procedures, the harder time they will have circumventing their defenses.
Have you ever wondered what happens when you report photos, Facebook pages or other offensive content? Well Gawker recently released a story that offers great insight into the matter.
The central figure of their piece is Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan who spent a few weeks training to screen and muck through the worst and darkest side of the Facebook underworld. He claims he was paid just $1.00 per hour and that Facebook is exploiting the third world. He was contracted through oDesk, a California based outsourcing firm.
Derkaoui also provided Gawker with a copy of a document called “Abuse Standards Violations,” which provides very clear guidelines on Facebook’s moderation efforts. Gawker calls this document “a map of Facebook’s moral terrain.”
Large numbers of women and girls continued to migrate internally and internationally for jobs as domestic workers. While this offers an important economic opportunity, reports of abuse, exploitation and servitude persist, particularly in wealthy countries within the region where there was high demand for live-in help—Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Inhumane treatment of domestic workers including starvation[5] and sexual abuse[6] was reported in 2015, as well as indicators of forced labour including extortionate recruitment fees, confinement to the place of employment, excessive unpaid overtime, withholding of wages and confiscation of identity documents.[7] In 2016, cases of domestic worker exploitation were also noted in countries with low levels of prevalence, such as Australia.[8]
The spate of suicides made headlines around the world. Last May, seven young Chinese workers producing Apple iPads for consumers across the globe took their own lives, prompting an investigation into working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, southern China.
Nine Chinese sociologists wrote an open letter to the media calling for an end to regimented and restrictive work practices which they condemned as “a model where fundamental human dignity is sacrificed for development”.
One year on, swaths of anti-suicide netting surround the huge worker dormitories in Shenzhen. But an investigation by two NGOs reveals that many workers making iPhones and iPads for eager world markets are exploited and living a dismal life.
In Shenzhen and Chengdu a joint Foxconn workforce of 500,000 is providing the labour that, in the first quarter of 2011, contributed to Apple Inc net profit of $6bn (£3.6bn). Interviews with mainly migrant employees and managers have laid bare the dark side of those profits: a Dickensian world of work that would be considered shocking in the west.
The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations and the human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) have a track record in investigating the human cost of China’s economic boom. The interviews they recently conducted in Shenzhen and Chengdu, which have been passed to the Observer, are sometimes heartrending.
“Sometimes my roommates cry when they arrive in the dormitory after a long day,” one 19-year-old girl told investigators. “It’s difficult to adapt to this work and hard to be away from your family.”
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — A hooded Mickey Mouse sweatshirt from Disney. Piles of children’s shorts with Wal-Mart’s Faded Glory label. Clothes with hip-hop star Sean Combs’ ENYCE tag.
The garment factory in Bangladesh where 112 people were killed in a fire over the weekend was used by a host of major U.S. and European retailers, an Associated Press reporter discovered Wednesday from clothes and account books left behind amid the blackened tables and melted sewing machines at Tazreen Fashions Ltd.
Wal-Mart had been aware of safety problems at the factory and said it had decided well before the blaze to stop doing business with it. But it said a supplier had continued to use Tazreen without authorization.
Sears, likewise, said its merchandise was being produced there without its approval through a vendor, which has since been fired. The Walt Disney Co. said its records indicate that none of its licensees have been permitted to make Disney-brand products at the factory for at least a year.
Labor activists have long contended that retailers in the West bear a responsibility to make sure the overseas factories that manufacture their products are safe. They seized on the blaze — the deadliest in Bangladesh’s nearly 35-year history of exporting clothing — to argue that retailers must insist on more stringent fire standards.
Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, said nothing will change unless clothing companies protect workers as vigorously as they protect their brands.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/11/28/bangladesh-fire-walmart-disney-sears/1731225/
(CBS News) Many of the clothes in American stores are made in Bangladesh, which has a history of workplace disasters. Six months ago, 112 workers died when their factory burned down. Last month, another factory collapsed, killing more than 1,100 workers in one of the worst industrial accidents ever.
If you own clothes that were made in Bangladesh, this is where they come from. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-goes-undercover-in-a-bangladesh-clothing-factory/
In a suite of offices lined with racks of clothes on the seventh floor of an industrial building in the back streets of Lai Chi Kok, the head of a trading company explains the economic reality that has transformed the global garment industry over the past decade.
“Ten years ago, you could only buy a T-shirt for US$5. Now you can buy a sweater for US$6, and for US$9 you can buy a jacket,” says Mandarin Lui Wing-har, managing director of the low-profile but highly influential Top Grade International Enterprise. “Of course, at the high end of the market, people will still pay US$500 for a T-shirt. They don’t care about the price, only the brand, and maybe only 50 T-shirts will be made in that style. But we are making maybe 50,000 T-shirts in each style – and that is why we can sell them for US$3 or US$4.”
It was already late when Maria, alone in her room, thought about taking her own life by jumping from the seventh floor window. Her day at work, just on the other side of the door, had again started around dawn and only ended 15 hours later. She felt weak, having not eaten for two days.
Maria (not her real name) had arrived in Brazil from the Philippines two months earlier, hired as a domestic worker by a family who lived in a wealthy neighbourhood of Sao Paulo.
The tasks they set her seemed never ending.
She had to help the mother with the three school-aged boys and a baby. Then clean the large apartment, which had a large dining room, a living room and four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Also walk the family’s dog, put all the children to bed.
The family’s mother usually stayed at home, closely watching everything Maria did. Once, complaining that Maria had not cleaned a glass table properly, she made her polish it for almost an hour. Some days she would count the clothes Maria had ironed and, not satisfied, would make her spend hours ironing some more.
Weeks would pass without Maria’s employers giving her a day off. With so much to do, she often had no time left to eat. Sometimes, even the food she was given was not enough.
On that night, she thought about her own family in the Philippine countryside: her mother and three young daughters, two of whom needed special medicine for their cardiac disease. With all of them depending on her wages, Maria had no choice but to carry on. So she made her bed and went to sleep.
“My world was spinning. I was crying,” recalled the 40-year-old about the day she almost ended her own life. She had dreamt of coming here – “I had heard that Brazil was nice” – and struggled to understand why she was being treated so badly.