The death of an auditor has pushed the auditors of the Internet industry to the forefront.
Yesterday, on the first working day after the Spring Festival in 2022, the employees of the Content Security Center of Station B received a "notice of all" email in their mailboxes.
"The content security center's partner in the graphics and text review department, 'Twilight Wood Heart' has left us forever."
The partner of the audit department mentioned in the email, 'Twilight Wood Heart', born in 1997, worked in the Wuhan branch of Station B before his death, and he continued to work this Spring Festival and did not return home. On February 4, he died of "extensive cerebral hemorrhage" after ineffective rescue.
The incident was initially exposed by netizens and fermented on Weibo on February 5. The whistleblower said that the deceased was "required to work overtime during the New Year" and suffered "the intensity of work from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.", and that the whistleblower believed that overtime was the direct cause of his sudden death.
Two days later, the internal email of Station B was a semi-public response. Although it was confirmed that some employees died on the fourth day of the Chinese New Year, and their identities were also consistent with the online transmission, for the "overtime death theory", Station B held a negative attitude: "After internal attendance verification, he commuted to work normally according to the work plan, working hours of 9:30-18:30, doing five breaks and two days off, and there was no overtime in the week before the incident."
The screenshot of this email quickly spread, and people quickly found the "audit commissioner" post recruitment information released by station B on multiple recruitment websites, which clearly wrote: This post has a night shift, an all-night shift, working twelve hours a day, do a break, mind not to vote.
In one of the recruitment messages, the "three shifts" are stated: the morning shift is from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., the evening shift is from 21:00 to 9:00 p.m. the next day, and the middle shift is from 12:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.
Prior to publication, the job posting could not be found.
Even the intensity of the work explicitly written in the job posting is so great that even if Station B emphasizes in the internal email that the deceased "did not have overtime in the week before the incident", it is difficult to calm the outside world's doubts.
The screenshot of the circle of friends released by the deceased on December 31 last year also adds to the weight of this doubt. In that circle of friends, "Twilight Wood Heart" shared the "year-end summary" generated in the enterprise WeChat app, which showed that it processed a total of 199,240 work sessions in 2021, which took 73,024 minutes; participated in 21,930 work discussions, the latest one being 4:42 a.m. on November 12.
The attention to the sudden death of employees at Station B has gradually expanded to the attention of the Internet "audit post".
People found that at every moment, in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, changsha and so on, there were always auditors working in front of the computer. Moreover, according to the requirements of the recruitment information, the auditor who is now working in front of the computer is not only adapted to the shift, but also has "strong ability to resist pressure".
As for their physical health and mental health, no one else knows.
A
At the beginning of April 2019, the 300th day of employment, Li Hua, the content reviewer of today's headlines, has become accustomed to the rhythm of the big night shift.
At 6:15 p.m., he walked out of the house as usual and spent an hour and a half to "Wisdom Mountain", the company's location in the North Tower of Wisdom Mountain, a new technology industrial park in Xiqing District, Tianjin, hence the name.
Less than 8 o'clock, Li Hua was ready in front of the workstation. He hit a cup of hot water, opened the notebook, logged into the system, and got to work.
The interface of the working system is very simple, the machine will automatically assign 10 comments each time, each comment is displayed in a box, the top is the title of the article, the middle is the comment content, and below are three function keys, which represent the release of comments, delete comments and see themselves.
Li Hua kept clicking between the three keys.
Pimping, selling the comments of the powerful pills, he glanced at it, quickly deleted, encountered sensitive content, you need to spend more time, click into it to view the content of the article and then operate.
At 3 a.m., Li Hua was a little confused, he picked up his coat and went to the lounge next to the office to take a nap. The lounge had bunk beds, but no pillows or quilts, and he wrapped his clothes tightly and curled up. The ventilation of the room was very poor, and Li Hua only squinted for a moment before returning to the workstation. In the late-night office, with only a few areas lit up, he had to pick up the spirits and finish the review of 10,000 comments by 8 a.m. the next morning.
The company evaluates performance every month, and the criteria for judging are the quantity and quality of the audit. In order to get A, colleagues will deliberately extend the working time to increase the number of audits, the original standard of the day shift is 8,000, and slowly everyone began to review 9,000, Li Hua was reluctant, but still chose to conform to the crowd.
As the number of audits increased, his dislike for the job grew, "I'm doing audits, what am I doing?" ”
The relatively generous treatment of this job makes it difficult for him to resign, in 2019, the average salary in Tianjin is only more than 3,000 yuan, and the auditors of today's headlines can get 4600 yuan.
At 8:00 a.m., Li Hua, who had completed his workload, got off work, and he bought a "big cake sandwich everything" at the entrance of the community. After working all night, his stomach was very fragile, and Li Hua chewed and prayed that he would not regurgitate vomiting today. Even if everything goes well in the stomach and intestines, the brain is still in a state of tension and excitement, and it always has to toss and turn for a long time to fall asleep.
A few days later, Li Hua resigned.
B
Compared with the rapid growth of the audit industry, Li Hua's departure is not even a noise.
"Today's headline review team expanded the enrollment of 2,000 people, the future target of 10,000 people, party members are preferred."
"Quick hand urgent recruitment of 3,000 people to review the team, Communist Youth League members and party members are preferred."
The april 2018 expansion was a watershed moment, and since then, the content moderation industry has begun to grow explosively.
At the beginning of April, Kuaishou and Volcano were successively rectified and interviewed. On April 10, the connotation of the paragraph was permanently shut down.
He Chong joined Toutiao in April 2017 and is responsible for the content review of the connotation paragraph. At that time, the review team of headlines had not yet grown, and articles, videos, pictures, comments, and He Chong had all been reviewed. With the refinement of the division of labor, He Chong was assigned to the video review team, 12 seconds to 5 minutes of short videos, he can review at least 800 per hour.
After the connotation paragraph was shut down, He Chong still remained in the headlines.
Also on July 22, 2018, CCTV News criticized websites and apps such as Station B by name for vulgar animation content, pointing out that some animations on Station B involved incest and other content. Subsequently, Station B immediately removed the suspected bad content video and started a review, and said that it would strengthen the user report feedback mechanism and hold relevant staff accountable.
Five days later, Station B announced rectification measures, saying that it would more than double the website audit manpower, and a new audit center in Wuhan had been established and would be officially operated that month.
On January 9, 2019, the China Online Audiovisual Program Service Association issued the Specifications for the Administration of Online Short Video Platforms (hereinafter referred to as the "Specifications") and the "Detailed Rules for the Standards for the Review of Online Short Video Content" (hereinafter referred to as the "Detailed Rules"). The "Specification" pointed out that the programs, comments, bullet screens and other content released by short video platforms must be reviewed first and sent later. The Detailed Rules detail the prohibited contents of 20 major categories and 100 sub-articles.
The expansion of the scope of review and the refinement of the rules mean that a large number of personnel need to be increased for the platform, so there has been a large expansion of the audit guard of internet companies led by the video platform. Skilled auditors have become a scarce resource.
He Chong felt that this might be an opportunity for his career.
Also excited by the news of the great expansion is Liu Hui. 2018 is the third year he joined the content review position, most of the colleagues who joined the same job that year have left, he said, the first year of employment is the most difficult, doing the lowest level of review work, simple machinery, can not see the direction.
Auditors aspire to content operations, and many people feel that controlling quality is more valuable and fulfilling than auditing compliance.
However, Liu Hui gradually realized that compared with the content operation positions that have matured the system, content review may have more room for development as an emerging position. Today, as the person in the group whose seniority is second only to the team leader, he can already bring new people, and the salary is of course higher than before.
The content review position is not worth nostalgia in the eyes of Li Hua, who graduated from the Department of Journalism, but he Chong and Liu Hui, the men of science and engineering, have their own views on the value of this job. They believe that the need for content moderation will not diminish, and that early completion of experience and skills may give them a first-mover advantage in future competition.
C
Unlike He Chong and Liu Hui, who are full of confidence, Fang Lei often compares himself to an Internet version of Foxconn employees.
In 2017, Fang Lei graduated from university and entered today's headlines to do content review. He studied at a second college in southwest China and interned at an Internet company in Beijing in his junior year. He didn't like to do content moderation, but only received this offer and had no choice.
The fresh graduates who joined with him ranged from ordinary second books to 211 and 985 high-quality students. Most of the latter leave their jobs quickly, "and then HR sees this kind of resume and simply doesn't want it," Fang lei said.
In this regard, today's headlines responded that the recruitment of content moderators is subject to the conditions, and there is no exclusionary restriction on 985 and 211 in terms of academic qualifications. As for whether the position has recruited 985 and 211 graduates in batches, the headlines have not responded.
That year, several large companies had not yet expanded the number of auditors with great fanfare, and Fang Lei had clearly sensed the changes in the industry, and colleagues around him came and went more frequently. Many people have thought about leaving this position, but in the end, only a few can transform. After leaving, many people still choose another company's audit post to continue to do, the market demand for auditors has never been broken, and it is not difficult to change a company at all.
The work of content moderation is fast-paced, but the significance and value of this job will always come to mind when Fang Lei is slightly relaxed. Like Li Hua, he often feels bored, but when the repeated deletions of pornographic loan sharks, selling guns and drugs, and attacking insults fill the screen, he will feel that he is needed and summoned by this society, "the real Internet is too angry."
Liang Jiamei entered a second-hand trading platform as a content reviewer after graduating from college, and in 2018, the sixth year, she was responsible for cleaning up various illegal information on the platform. Every once in a while, I go to the Ministry of Public Security to learn about the latest criminal instruments and illegal drugs. Liang Jiamei can skillfully distinguish between several different drugs, even if some of them appear to be no different from normal drugs.
Screening out harmful information is an important part of the auditor's work. One former reviewer described a video that he censored and deleted: on a construction site, an 18-year-old child, naked watching TV, holding an old hen in his hand, "In case the video is seen by a child, learn what to do, a lifetime will be ruined," the auditor wrote responsibly in his blog.
But after a year of work, Fang Lei felt that his emotions were becoming more and more depressed. He is not keen on socializing, but content moderation has been done for a long time, and he is eager to communicate with people, "doing auditing, every day like a robot, physically and mentally exhausted." In the end, he chose to leave and went to a small company to do content operations.
A more serious problem for content moderators is that long-term exposure to harmful information can cause psychological harm.
In September 2018, a content reviewer who had worked for Facebook took the former owner to court. She was responsible for removing pornography, violence and other harmful content on Facebook, and after 9 months of work, she developed PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
Zhou Ting, who has worked on content review for two years, said that she often felt very tired during those two years, because she always focused on dark, negative content, and work was her "happy black hole".
The question is, why work in a job that is not happy for two years?
"Making a living", Zhou Ting immediately gave the answer. She worked on a paid knowledge platform and interned for several months in a content operations position where there were no retention opportunities. When it was time to leave, the company created a new content moderation position. Although she was very reluctant to audit work, she was able to stay in the company of her choice, which made Zhou Ting very happy.
Zhang Qiang became an auditor when Zhang Yiming just shouted out "ten thousand auditors", becoming one in ten thousand, and he was very satisfied. The subsidies are complete, and there is little overtime, "the new auditor from the next department, the internship period of 6 months, the performance of 6 A's, has been promoted to team leader." Only if you have the strength, this company is not short of money," he said of the future career plan.
In October 2018, headlines broke the news of a new round of financing of $4 billion.
Before the news of the financing broke, Toutiao's branch in Tianjin moved to a new office, located in Lujiazui Financial Plaza in Hongqiao District. The offices that have been put into use are located on the 15th to 23rd floors, with a circular layout, surrounded by a full circle of floor-to-ceiling windows, excellent lighting and views, and a variety of greenery in the office area.
Within a few years, the number of headline Tianjin auditors had expanded from more than a hundred to thousands. Half of the visitor registers at the front desk of the building were interviewees. In Douban's Tianjin rental group, "within the scope of headline subsidies" has also become a label when subletting some houses.
Content moderation is yubo's most satisfying job to date. In 2016, he graduated from a college e-commerce major, worked in telemarketing and logistics, and briefly helped out at a relative's supermarket.
At the beginning of 2017, Yu Bo graduated from a Java training class, when he found that the dividend period of the industry had passed, and the job was not easy to find. When I was anxious, a job posting for a content moderator for an informational app came into view, and the recruiter was an outsourcing company. When outsourcing companies recruit content review positions, the requirements are often relatively relaxed, and a college degree can be enough.
At first, Yu Bo did not hold out much hope. This job is far from his professional background and work experience, but when interviewing, the person in charge of the information platform does not care about the match between professional and experience. The interview focuses more on the degree of understanding of current political events. Yu Bo has maintained the habit of browsing information since he was a student and passed the interview smoothly.
With this job, Yu Bo successfully paid off the loan fee for learning Java before, saying that he had been working for several years and could no longer manage the family's money.
D
Compared with the complex attitude of auditors, second-tier cities eager to introduce Internet companies are open to the content moderation industry.
Tianjin is very active in attracting Internet companies to settle in, and Internet companies set up branches in Tianjin and can enjoy preferential treatment and subsidies in taxes, rents and other aspects.
In 1988, Tianjin New Technology Industrial Park was officially established. In 2009, it was renamed as Binhai High-tech Industrial Development Zone. In the same year, Tencent established a research and development and data storage center in Tianjin, which is the fifth city in Tencent's layout after Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu. At the end of 2011, Binhai High-tech Zone went to Zhongguancun to attract investment. A year later, Sohu Video Headquarters officially settled in the district. During this period, there were also 58 cities and Amazon.
In 2015, Toutiao also came to Tianjin, registered Tianjin ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd. in Tianjin Binhai High-tech Industrial Development Zone, with a registered capital of 16 million US dollars, and set up a project research and development center, operation center, customer service center, etc.
Tianjin Binhai New Area
Three years later, Toutiao moved its office to The Lujiazui Financial Center. In the eyes of Tianjin people, although Hongqiao District is the sixth district in the city, it develops late, and compared with other districts, it is always worse. Today, Hongqiao District has ushered in ByteDance, a company that has become a benchmark for the Internet in Tianjin at the salary level, and may be able to improve its position in the minds of Tianjin people.
According to China Entrepreneur, for Internet companies, the content review department is actually a very heavy cost burden, but it cannot but be carried. Enterprises will move such departments to second- and third-tier cities such as Tianjin, and their preference is on local preferential policies, which can reduce the cost burden.
For local governments, being able to attract well-known Internet companies is a political achievement, even if they are only in the marginal business units of these companies.
After Tianjin, there is Xi'an. Compared with Tianjin, Xi'an's labor costs are lower. There are also many colleges and universities here, and many college students will be absorbed into the audit work as interns, and the monthly income is around 2,000 at that time.
As the capital of Hubei Province and a central megacity with excellent university student resources, Wuhan is naturally also among them. Today, Wuhan has gathered almost all well-known Internet companies such as ByteDance, Kuaishou, tencent and so on, and Ali's central China regional headquarters is located here.
In 2018, Station B entered Wuhan to open a branch, and in April 2020, Station B also announced a significant expansion of the Wuhan branch, with the goal of expanding to 1,000 people. The "Twilight Wood Heart" of this accident joined Station B 1 month later.
In September 2018, Toutiao's hometown, Longyan, set up the sixth content quality center after Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Xi'an and Chengdu. Kuaishou has established its own audit centers in Beijing, Tianjin, Wuxi, Wuhan, Harbin and Yancheng.
According to Late Post, the number of byteDance's reviewers has exceeded 20,000 in early 2021.
In this round of rapid progress of content moderation centers, more and more cities have ushered in Internet companies.
And
The need to censor Internet content has been around for a long time, and 2018 was an explosive year.
In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology tried to require all computers produced and sold on the mainland to install Green Dam software that filters Internet content. The software includes two products that are responsible for image and text filtering, respectively. Under the pressure of public opinion, this decision was not implemented in the end.
But the pace of large-scale censorship of Internet content has not stopped.
The outbreak of content in the mobile Internet era has also promoted the development of the auditing industry. In July 2012, the WeChat public account was launched, and according to WeChat official data, as of the end of July 2014, the total number of WeChat public accounts was 5.8 million, and 15,000 new accounts were added every day.
The rise of information platforms that rely on algorithm recommendations, such as today's headlines, has also made the need for auditing more urgent.
In the past, information platforms, such as the former portal website, mainly implemented the editor responsibility system. Most of the content on the website is manually published by editors, and even if there is an automatic crawl function, the object is often a media with cooperative relations, and the content is safe and secure. However, today's headlines take the form of machine grabbing and algorithm recommendation to present content, and non-compliant content is more likely to become a fish that slips through the net.
At the same time, the risk posed by non-compliant content is increasing. In April 2014, Sina.com revoked its Internet Publishing License and The Information Network Transmission Audiovisual Program License for its reading channel and video programs involving pornographic content, and Baidu was also punished for its involvement in pornography on mobile fiction channels. In December last year, Xiaohongshu was fined 300,000 yuan by the Shanghai Huangpu District Culture and Tourism Bureau for "the leakage of information on minors".
Behind a lot of yellow information, there are often organized black industry gangs, and the place where traffic gathers is often the hardest hit area. Zhu Haoqi graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Zhejiang University and joined NetEase in 2008, initially responsible for the maintenance and development of a community product. In response to the frequent pornography in the community, Zhu Anderson and several colleagues were put together into a special security team to guard against spam.
His team often fought against the black industry groups, and one night, a large number of posts containing pornographic service information suddenly appeared on the front page of the community. Initially text, after the sensitive words were collected by the machine and blocked, they began to appear in the pictures with pornographic information, so the technical team continued to adjust the blocking strategy in the background until all the paths of the other party were blocked.
From 2014 to 2016, it was the most intensive overtime period for Zhu Haoqi and his team. In fact, the artificial intelligence technology applied to auditing has made a breakthrough as early as 2012, when Geoffrey E. Hinton, a professor in the Department of Computational Science at the University of Toronto, led his students to design a deep learning model, AlexNet. Against the backdrop of an outbreak of internal capacity and tighter regulations, the technology began to industrialize on a large scale in 2014.
As a technician, Zhu Haoqi passed the content review and saw the opportunities in the field of content security, and now he is the CTO of NetEase Cloud Yidun. In 2001, when NetEase established the Audit Center, it was only responsible for the content control of NetEase's email, blog, photo album and other products. In 2016, NetEase Cloud launched the cloud security brand "Easy Shield", which can cover content filtering services, and soon welcomed many enterprise users.
"The 2C market is almost over, entering the B-end market is the trend of the times, and content security is an important piece." Zhu Haoqi said.
Fan Kai worked in a content moderation position for four years, and at the end of his first year, he thought about leaving, when he was in a well-known Internet company with a pre-tax salary of 5,000, and his work life was stable. Stable but without a sense of achievement, in his view, the platform operation is good, has nothing to do with the auditors, once there is a problem, they can not blame.
In the interview, Fang Lei talked about the big events in the content review circle, sina weibo had an auditor interviewed by the media, the manuscript described in detail the review process of Weibo, which caused many netizens to insult, and the incident ended with the dismissal of the auditor concerned.
Fan Kai tried to switch to a content operation post within the company, but the company was too big, and the review and operation belonged to different systems, and the transfer was almost impossible. He also tried to give resumes to other companies, the demand for review positions has been growing, it is not difficult to jump jobs, but it is not easy to transfer jobs, interviews for the operation of several companies, have been euphemistically told, at this stage his ability is not enough.
In succession, Fan Kai sometimes laughs at himself, his resume and ability are as mediocre as his own, if it is not the position of content review, he may not be able to enter the big company in the Internet field. In the end, he chose to abandon the large company and move to a medium-sized company, although the position is still content moderation, but the work content has begun to have an operational component.
For content reviewers, it's a job of experiencing disillusionment with a hint of hope. In this huge team, most people do not have academic qualifications and professional advantages, and content moderation is a shortcut for them to enter the Internet factory. But boring, monotonous, and even harmful working conditions can quickly lead to emotions of doubt and retreat.
Shen Pengwei has been engaged in content moderation for eight years. Initially, he engaged in mailbox anti-spam work at NetEase, analyzing various types of emails according to the characteristics in the code, and maintaining the feature database so that the system could better identify spam. Later, he was transferred to the NetEase Cloud Easy Shield Audit Center as the audit director, managing a large team of hundreds of people.
Shen Pengwei feels that although this job is relatively monotonous in the early stage, it will definitely be rewarded after years of accumulation. He hopes that in the future, the audit work can also establish a corresponding qualification system to bring more sense of belonging to practitioners.
Some auditors can't wait that long. Wang Chao, who graduated from a key undergraduate college, chose to leave after only half a year as a content reviewer, and when he talked about the job, he said, "There is really nothing to say."
(At the request of the interviewee, Li Hua, He Chong, Fang Lei, Song Ting, Yu Bo, Fan Kai, and Wang Chao are pseudonyms)