Behind the Screen Audiobook By Sarah T. Roberts cover art

Behind the Screen

Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

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Behind the Screen

By: Sarah T. Roberts
Narrated by: Laura Darrell
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An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material - sometimes thousands of items per day.

Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

©2019 Sarah T. Roberts (P)2019 Audible, Inc. Content Creation & Social Media History & Culture Media Studies Social Sciences Technology & Society Technology
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Maybe it gets better? To be sure, my review is based only on the first 2.5 hours and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I just couldn't persist, despite being highly interested in the topic. I experienced the reader as talented but uncomfortably mismatched to this type of book. The writing, to me, started to feel like a book-length Huffington Post article. The author is clearly bright and capable, and I suspect she'll produce authoritative works in the future. Shoot, the writing might be far stronger in the latter part of this book. But I'm moving on now. I'd love to get to a better part, but I'm too bothered by the oddly mismatched intonation of the reader, the flexing word choices and jargon, and the fact that I've not yet learned something new/useful in 2.5 hours.

I could only make it through a third

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Not a great book. Lacks an argument that isn’t emotional, one sided or otherwise bias.

Poorly written and argued

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