Auditor, the hidden corner of the big factory

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Shenrancaijing, author | Li Qiuhan, Editor, | Wei Jia

In his third month as an auditor, Zhang Xiaofei, who was born in 1997, began to eat melatonin.

His large factory audit post three shifts, shift down, he has three or four days a month to stay up late. During that time, he went to the company at 11 p.m. to start working, and there would be two buttons next to the reviewed video, "Fresh" and "Not Recommended", as well as subdivision options such as "vulgar" and "porter", which he handled. Facing the computer, he continued to press the mouse, and when he was tired, he lay on his stomach to rest. At 9 a.m., he went home to sleep, and at 11 p.m. he came to work and started another day's big night shift.

Irregular schedules made him start to lose sleep. If you really haven't fallen asleep and it's time to go to work, you can ask the leader for leave, but this is not a long-term solution. A colleague around him ate melatonin in order to sleep, and he also bought a bottle, which was really useful. However, for fear of dependence, he did not dare to eat more.

A few months later, he chose to leave.

On February 5, a big V broke the news on Weibo that the leader of the Wuhan AI audit team of Station B died of sudden cerebral hemorrhage in the early morning of the fifth morning of the first month due to overtime work during the New Year. On February 7, Station B mentioned in the internal email that after internal attendance verification, the employee did not have overtime in the week before the incident, and the working hours were 9:30-18:30, and there were five days off. This internal email caused netizens to question, in the B station before the audit commissioner's recruitment information screenshot, written with the post "there are night supper shifts, overnight shifts, work 12 hours a day" words. A day later, Station B responded again that it will expand the recruitment of auditors with the greatest efforts and increase the recruitment of 1,000 people this year.

Seeing the news of the sudden death of the auditor, Zhang Xiaofei had some feelings. This is a high-intensity work, users are producing content at different times, in order to be able to audit as soon as possible, avoid accumulation, the large factory audit post 24 hours have people in operation, no matter how many shifts, there are always employees who can not avoid staying up late.

Du Jian has been working in the audit post for more than 6 years, all the way from front-line employees to management posts. He said that when recruiting front-line employees, they generally do not recruit people over the age of 30, "because they really can't stay up late", which is also the reason why most of the young people in the audit post are.

On the one hand, this is a very important post, without this moat, pornography, violence, blood and other content will flood the network, greatly affecting the user experience, but on the other hand, for practitioners, this post does have problems such as mechanical work content, irregular work and rest, and small development space.

The sudden death of the auditor of Station B has brought this position, which has not been paid too much attention, into the public eye. In fact, this is already a huge group of employees in the big factory - comprehensive multiple media reports, at the end of 2020, there are more than 1,000 Xiaohongshu review employees, about 2,400 employees in the content screening team of Station B, and in January 2021, there are more than 20,000 byteDance content moderators. Their working status can no longer be ignored by the managers of large factories.

How hard is it to audit the post?

On the screen, a young lady wearing black stockings twisted her crotch at the camera, revealing a career line in the flash of the camera. Zhang Xiaofei is a little hesitant, he has reviewed too many such videos, some wearing hip skirts, some wearing Christmas clothes, the scale is not easy to judge, press the mouse, he clicked the "vulgar" option. This means that the video has not been reviewed.

Such an action, Zhang Xiaofei has to repeat 1600 times a day. Later, the video quality inspection colleagues feedback that the scale was not within the "vulgar" range, passed the upload of the video, and gave Zhang Xiaofei a work error.

At this moment, he was a little tired. In the big factory's bright office, he sat at his desk, facing the computer, clicking between several options, and he had been doing so for more than half a year. "Every day's work is like moving a mountain, today it's done, tomorrow the mountain is here again, and you have to keep moving," he said, feeling like a machine, constantly brushing numbers.

Although the KPIs of different companies and different audit positions are different, there are clear assessment figures. For example, as an employee of a head short video platform, Zhang Xiaofei has to review more than 1,600 videos a day. A former employee of Station B told Deep Burn that they need to review 2,000 videos a day, which translates to an average of 21.6 seconds to review one. Some companies have heavy KPIs, and employees are busy and don't even have time to eat or go to the toilet.

This is the reason why Zhang Xiaofei resigned more impulsively than staying up late.

Under such a working hours and assessment system, the income of audit posts cannot catch up with other positions in large factories, and most of the work places are located in Tianjin, Wuhan, Chengdu and other cities. But for some young people who admire the aura of the big factory, they are still willing to accept it in the absence of better career options. Du Jian said that what he understands is that the salary of the basic auditor is 4,000-6,000 yuan, plus various subsidies, and the after-tax is about 5,000 yuan. Promoted to the leader of the group, the after-tax salary is 6,000 yuan-7,000 yuan, to the supervisor level, about 10,000 yuan after tax, and the salary range of higher management is large, generally between 20,000 and 30,000.

Also choosing to leave the audit post is Tong Wen.

Unlike Zhang Xiaofei, Tong Wen is adapted to this job. He likes to stay up late, thinking that when reviewing content, he can see novel content that many users can't see, which helps him to understand things more comprehensively. In the end, I chose to leave my job because the development space of this position is really limited. "All I can think of is to go from audit to quality inspection", that is, the audit of audit, which is not attractive to him.

The boring content of work, the need to stay up late, and the small space for development are the three main reasons for the review post to discourage young people. Nie Bin, the audit manager of a large factory, told Shen Yan that the young people with good academic qualifications and experience he met during recruitment often did not know much about this position, the stability would not be strong, and he usually did not consider it. Because of the need to work a large night shift, the female student has a harder time and harder during the menstrual period, which makes him more willing to consider men when recruiting.

This position is still hidden, and the invisible impact on practitioners.

Du Jian told Shen Yan that after a long time of auditing, he would see a lot of dark sides. "Bloody and other such things are small things, and there are beheadings and killing scenes at every turn, some pornographic and violent content, which is actually harmful to the spirit of front-line reviewers."

In foreign countries, there are also practitioners who are similarly troubled. Previously, there were media reports that in 2019, former auditor Chris Gray filed a lawsuit against his former owner Facebook, saying that he had suffered serious psychological trauma during a year of work. The videos he routinely review includes scenes of abuse, executions, etc., and over time, he says, "I became numb and grumpy, and more and more aggressive." ”

He also mentioned, "Every time I think back to the content of my work, my mood will suddenly fall to the bottom, and only escape can make me forget those terrible pictures for a while." I haven't fallen asleep for a week in a row. ”

Because he was promoted from the front line to the management, Du Jian could understand the pressure of the audit post employees, "the company's spiritual care for them must be in place, every day to see the yellow gambling and drugs, not only do not care for support, but also at every turn to assess the KPI, who will not be able to stand it." ”

Machines can't replace it

On the one hand, the audit post is that the practitioners are subjected to invisible pressure, on the other hand, it has an irreplaceable position in the Internet world.

In the era of information explosion, "if there is really no review, each platform will be filled with pornography, violence, blood and other content, and review is the moat of the content platform and the ecology of the protection platform", although leaving the industry, Zhang Xiaofei still recognizes the value of this position.

What impressed him most was that there was user feedback that a blogger had suicidal tendencies and that he was involved in helping. He told Shen Yan that although most of this kind of information feedback is false, they will carefully judge, if there is really suicidal tendency, they will directly report it, and decide whether to call the police after the superior judgment, "requiring it to be dealt with within ten minutes, after all, human life is closed." After doing all this, he said that there was a sense of accomplishment that saving a person's life was better than creating a seventh-level floating massacre.

Engaged in the auditing industry for 5 years, Nie Bin also mentioned that users who are monitored to have suicidal tendencies will report to the local police station according to the user's IP address. Some social platforms will also punish accounts suspected of fraud such as pig killing plates through auditors to prevent users from being deceived.

However, the position of auditor also faces an embarrassing situation. Internet information is growing exponentially, all information is manually reviewed, facing problems such as high cost, slow speed, low efficiency, whether it is from the perspective of reducing labor costs or standardization considerations, large factories are trying how to "let the machine replace the auditor".

Indeed, in recent years, the auditing industry has made technological advances.

Nie Bin told Shen Yan that in 2016, the big factory where he was located had just developed the video business, and the team of twenty or thirty people relied on manual review to watch every frame of all the videos, and there was no machine intervention. Later, the amount of video is more, will use the frame sampling method to review it first, such as a video of 30 seconds, will draw 20 frames from it, over the algorithm, if it matches the problem content in the model library, the video can not be online, do not need every video by manual review.

Li Shu, an employee of a third-party company that specializes in promoting the "machine review" business, told Deep Burn that in the case of text, when they first launched the pornography model, the accuracy rate was only about 20%, and after test tuning, the accuracy rate of the machine review could reach more than 90% after a few years.

Even so, manual review is still an important part of the industry.

Li Shu said that the machine review is timely, low cost, and strong standardization, but the disadvantage is that the model needs to be continuously generalized and learned. For example, after some emergencies occur, new vocabulary or pictures will be generated, which requires continuous training of the model to improve the accuracy of the machine review, but it takes time before and after this. For the feedback of emergencies, it is particularly dependent on human review.

Previously, some auditors mentioned in interviews with the media that the longer they engaged in auditing, the more certain they were that human auditing would never be replaced by machines. "Because netizens are really too powerful, especially Chinese is broad and profound, pornography, gambling, fraud and other problem content will always be deformed."

At present, many large factories use the combination of "machine review + human review", that is, a large number of preliminary screenings are completed by machine audits in the early stage, the corresponding labels are returned, and then reviewed by hand, and the quality inspection personnel will review the content again.

Because of this, the number of audit posts in large factories is increasing year by year.

Will the auditor's situation be better?

The sudden death of employees at Station B has pushed the audit post into the spotlight.

In recent years, the demand for auditors in large factories has continued to grow, but there is still room for improvement in the specific importance attached to employees.

Nie Bin mentioned a confusion. Although he recognizes the value of the audit, he is embarrassed that "the audit itself does not generate revenue and value for the company, so the team needs to desperately find a way to prove its role." ”

Du Jian told Deep Burn that when the performance system of the early audit post has not yet been independent, if the performance has three gradients of S/A/B, the audit post will always be B, "because it is difficult to have bright spots." When he led the team, this result was very discouraging to employees, and the company did not seem to be interested in setting up a good incentive model.

Employees face great work intensity and do not give sufficient protection in the system. For example, in order to save costs, du Jian's previous company did not give overtime pay after employees stayed up late and overtime, and could only transfer, but the pace of work did not allow them to have the opportunity to rest, resulting in employees not being able to stop and rest.

Avoiding overwork and motivating employees is not without solutions.

For example, in the scheduling, Du Jian mentioned that the key is to rationally allocate night shifts, overtime and the use of manpower, do a good job of cooperation between manpower and machines, three shifts (8 hours per shift) than two shifts (12 hours per shift), relatively more acceptable to employees.

When encountering statutory holidays such as the Spring Festival, some companies will plan in advance, give sufficient overtime pay, attract employees who are willing to stay and work overtime, and find outsourcing companies to increase manpower and solve temporary manpower needs. Nie Bin concluded that in fact, the night shift needs to be controlled, to ensure that employees rest, and at the same time, welfare benefits should also be sufficient.

In terms of employee development space, although it is recognized that the space is small, it is not completely absent.

Nie Bin, who has been promoted to audit manager, introduced that from a vertical point of view, the development of audit post employees has 6 stages of front-line, team leader, supervisor, manager, director, and base leader, and in the horizontal, there are also opportunities to expand to the post of commissioner, such as quality inspection, risk control, strategy, training, etc., not completely without space.

As an old man in the industry, Du Jian tried to operate the post, but found that the space he could explore in the operation was not as good as the audit post. First of all, a department of the audit post is often hundreds of people, testing the management ability, and secondly, "the audit post is a post that can intervene in the front-line business, in addition to the audit content, it can also extend the exploration of the user grade credit system, public opinion monitoring, product experience research, etc., which can rise to the management of the entire content ecology of the platform," he said.

Although in the eyes of some people, the audit post is equivalent to the "low-end assembly line worker", many practitioners still recognize this profession. Of course, with the increase in the number of auditors, the difficulty of promotion is also increasing, and the problems of low sense of value and limited development space do exist.

Du Jian frankly said that if you can do technology and products, no one will be willing to do low-threshold audit posts. But for young people with insufficient education and experience who want to enter a large factory, the audit post is also an opportunity to touch the Internet industry. Compared with small companies, the positions of large factories are relatively stable, at least there will be no case of unpaid wages, and the welfare package is more perfect. But more than one practitioner suggested that if in this position, there is no promotion or reach a new stage for 1 year, young people can consider changing industries.

This is a new occupation born with the Birth of the Internet industry, under the pressure of competition in recent years, the platform has put forward more efficient requirements for auditing, more than one auditor mentioned that the large factory did not have to be forced to work overnight before, under the benefits of attraction by employees to participate voluntarily, and later became mandatory, everyone had to participate.

The essential question behind all this is whether the payment and return are equal, whether the company takes into account the acceptance of employees under the pressure of high-intensity work, and whether it has enough attention and care for the health of employees.

This time the audit post has received attention, "I hope to let everyone have a preliminary understanding of the risk control industry, let more people pay attention to the working status at the bottom of the industry, and reduce some of the PUA in the workplace," Li Shu said.

*At the request of the interviewee, all names are used in this article.