Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Wednesday, June 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today.

More revelations about the horrible job that is being a Facebook moderator.

Best Buy now doubles as a genius bar, sort of.

YouTube has some new AR tricks and is mollering some changes for kids and the reaction to

Facebook's crypto play has me fascinated here's what you missed today in the world

of tech. The big story that everyone has been talking about today is from The

Virge. Casey Newton did another investigative report about a Facebook

content moderation facility, this time in Tampa, Florida. This time he spoke to 12 former Facebook content moderators

three of them on the record breaking their confidentiality agreements and

I'm not going to quote from it extensively because I want you to read it for yourself and also you know the drill.

It is super depressing.

Appalling working conditions, many of the workers are coming away with PTSD because of all of the

insane stuff that they have to wade through every day.

I think of what Casey said when he came on this show to talk about his piece last time that these people should

be treated and paid like the frontline social workers and societal EMTs that they are. The piece is super critical of cognizant again, the company

that Facebook outsources the moderation to, but as Casey sums up, quote,

if you believe moderation is a high-skilled high-stakes job

that presents unique psychological risks to your workforce,

you might hire all of those workers as full-time employees.

But if you believe that it is a low-skill job that will

someday be done primarily by algorithms, you probably would not. Instead, you would do what

Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter have done and hire companies like

...