The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

Have you wondered what life would be like for a Facebook or YouTube moderator?

It’s a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit — or are simply let go.

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Casey Newton — The Verge

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Facebook keeps asking for our trust even as it loses control of our data

These breaches keep happening. One day in not so distant future, one of the breaches would end up being the final straw.

Over a long enough time span, all data is liable to be breached. It’s why some security researchers call on companies to store as little data about their customers as possible, to minimize the damage when the inevitable happens. As an advertising company, Facebook cannot easily adopt such an approach. But it could modulate the other ways in which it asks us for our trust — perhaps deciding, as Google did, to leave the camera out of its home speaker; or not to put on stage an executive soliciting our most personal information, however well anonymized, while the investigation into a data breach affecting millions is still underway.

Instead, it’s full speed ahead.

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Casey Newton — The Verge

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Big Vape is copying Big Tobacco’s playbook

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It’s the same tactics over and over again.

So when The Simpsons mocked industry claims that they didn’t market to kids a few years ago, many vapers weren’t amused. In the episode, Bart goes to the Kwik-E-Mart to buy e-cigs, and Apu tells him that while they’re legal for children in their state, “this is not kid stuff.” Then Apu asks, “Now would you like bubble gum flavor, strawberry shortcake, or watermelon dream?” A writer for Vaping360 complained that the show played to “common fears and misconceptions.”

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Liza Gross — The Verge

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How do you cool 7.5 billion people on a warming planet?

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Adapting will be expensive. With every degree of warming that gets locked into the climate system, the more it will cost to maintain something resembling normal life, and the more people there will be who are unable to afford it. The particular problem posed by heat isn’t that it’s impossible to adapt to, it’s that it’s difficult to adapt to equitably and in a way that doesn’t make the problem worse. Like mitigating climate change overall, any cooling solution will require collective action, in the form of international agreements like the Kigali Amendment, efficiency regulations, subsidies, technological advances, new building designs, and civic programs.

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Josh Dzieza — The Verge

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