Orange County Employment Lawyers Blog
Since Facebook introduced its live stream feature on its incredibly popular social media application, people have been recording many different aspects of their daily lives and posting them to their Facebook walls. In some of these cases, we see people ranting about politics, or perhaps someone will post a video of himself or herself driving in traffic with a smartphone camera sitting on the dashboard.
In addition to these common variety live feed posts (which can be watched at any time later as well), there has been an alarming trend of people being beaten, kidnapped and even killed that have been posted on Facebook and watched by millions. There have also been several suicide attempts or actual suicides posted on the social media site.There has been a lot of public outcry because of these videos, and for good reason, but the company was not sure what to do other than taking down the streaming video service, which it does not want to do.
However, as discussed in a recent news article from Reuters, the company plans to hire 3,000 workers to monitor the videos being posted on the streaming platform and to remove anyone that may be showing any of these disturbing images. Up until now, the company had been trying to use automated software to look for these disturbing videos and flag them for inspection or removal. However, the company quickly realized that software programs are not getting the job done, as too many troubling videos are being overlooked.
The company also realized that to combat this problem, human workers who know what they are looking for is the only way to get these videos off the site, and this is why they now plan to hire 3,000 new employees. These are not the only employees who will be working for the social media giant to make sure there are no (or few) posts that violate the company’s posting policies. There are currently 4,500 employees who do this job now, but the vast number of videos being updated has overwhelmed them. Whether these new employees will be able to completely get rid of these horrific videos remains to be seen, but any increase in employment is a good thing.
One interesting point worth noting is that we are not sure what form this new employment will take. It is not known if these will be full-time jobs, or even if they will be work from home jobs where people get paid based upon some type of production metric. There is a growing trend, as our Los Angeles employment attorneys have seen, to hire people for jobs in what is known as the on-demand economy. This description includes some well-known examples like Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as a large variety of other app-based employment opportunities.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with this model, problems arise when companies treat these on-demand workers as employees for every purpose except the payment of wages and the distribution of benefits.
In cases where workers may be concerned that they are not properly classified and potentially cheated out of important benefits, it’s important to contact an experienced employment lawyer.
Contact the employment attorneys at Nassiri Law Group, practicing in Orange County, Riverside and Los Angeles. Call 949.375.4734.
Additional Resources:
Facebook to add 3,000 workers to catch and remove streaming violence, May 3, 2017, May 3, 2017, By David Ingram, Reuters
More Blog Entries:
Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Engineer, March 25, 2017, Orange County Sexual Harassment Lawyer Blog