The bots are not bots, they are human beings in offices applying rules handed down from outside, perhaps from some other office in California, onto content they must view—your vacation photos, your aunt’s Minions meme, beheadings, your uncle’s pornography, your neighbor’s glorifications of Hitler, your friend trying to make a living selling herbal teas, your local MP’s anti-immigrant diatribe.
Somewhere people sit behind screens in drab office buildings and get shown everything from pictures of topless Jesus to snuff videos and decide what stays, what goes, and what gets “escalated.”
Artists Eva & Franco Mattes have embarked on a video project along with writer Adrian Chen to talk to the not-bots, the Facebook content moderators forbidden from speaking to the press or to anyone, really, warned there might be “spies” in their midst.