Madison reveals experiences working at LMG

[Vexenar]

1 hour ago, Cooldoe said:

We are specifically talking about working in social media manager position and this thread is about madison issue

If someone cannot take the position that they applied for then they should request to be moved or resign.

 

I agree that in the company there should not be any harassment and there should be guardrail for that. But in reality the guardrail very focused on to guard woman and man is more likely to be fired for even a small complain. One of the advise my boss given by HR is to never step into elevator/room where there only you and someone from the opposite sex.

 

you do realize because he is a celebrity he is receiving those in daily basis not just due to this issue right?

We can perfectly discuss the social media manager position and forum moderation, because the two positions share a lot of overlap in how they deal with social media, community and both are subjected to similar forms of abuse. I don't understand why you are trying to differentiate the two.

Similarly, I don't understand why you are trying to deflect from my criticism that LMG does not have tools in place to protect their workers from abuse, whether that abuse is internally or externally to the company is semantics and doesn't matter. It also does not matter whether that person is a man or female, both should be protected and both should get the benefit of the doubt when they are bringing forward sexual allegations against a company or a person. 

Let's be real here and look at the facts, the amount of sexual inappropriate conduct woman on the workfloor have to deal with is astronomically higher than what men have to deal with. That's both due to culture where the women is/was seen as the weaker sex and that we took way too long to properly address these misconducts in the past. We're playing catch-up in that sense in a global scale. I'm not justifying abuse against males here but it's obvious that it's a much bigger problem for the female workforce than for the male workforce. 

I am aware that Linus gets abuse, but it is not his job to deal with abuse that is targeted at him or the company, that is the Social Media Manager's job which brings me back to the point I originally raised where there should be guardrails in place to help those people deal with the amount of abuse they are forced to deal with on a daily basis. It's also deflecting away from the case at hand which was Madison being put in a position that made her feel uncomfortable and receiving no help from inside the company. 

And then there is also the issue where most of the abuse Linus gets is due to him putting his own head on the chopping block by speaking his unfiltered views, which more often than not cause these community backlashes and abuse that are specifically targetting him. The man is his own worst enemy. 

 

16 minutes ago, Cooldoe said:

It just seem to be a lot of people want tk put guardrail to protect a woman but fail to notice the same issue also occurred to other people in the vicinity as well

You are cherry picking from my post, if you read my post I said that I wanted guardrails in place for people working at LTT, and specifically people that have to deal with the abuse posted on social media. 

[Cooldoe]

Just now, Vexenar said:

We can perfectly discuss the social media manager position and forum moderation, because the two positions share a lot of overlap in how they deal with social media, community and both are subjected to similar forms of abuse. I don't understand why you are trying to differentiate the two.

Similarly, I don't understand why you are trying to deflect from my criticism that LMG does not have tools in place to protect their workers from abuse, whether that abuse is internally or externally to the company is semantics and doesn't matter. It also does not matter whether that person is a man or female, both should be protected and both should get the benefit of the doubt when they are bringing forward sexual allegations against a company or a person. 

Let's be real here and look at the facts, the amount of sexual inappropriate conduct woman on the workfloor have to deal with is astronomically higher than what men have to deal with. That's both due to culture where the women is/was seen as the weaker sex and that we took way too long to properly address these misconducts in the past. We're playing catch-up in that sense in a global scale. I'm not justifying abuse against males here but it's obvious that it's a much bigger problem for the female workforce than for the male workforce. 

I am aware that Linus gets abuse, but it is not his job to deal with abuse that is targeted at him or the company, that is the Social Media Manager's job which brings me back to the point I originally raised where there should be guardrails in place to help those people deal with the amount of abuse they are forced to deal with on a daily basis. 

And then there is also the issue where most of the abuse Linus gets is due to him putting his own head on the chopping block by speaking his unfiltered views, which more often than not cause these community backlashes and abuse that are specifically targetting him. The man is his own worst enemy. 

I think you need to reread my post.

I do agree with you they need to protect employee in the workplace and have HR policy for internal.

There is no debate on that.

 

What is disagree with you is one employee need to be protected from any risk outside. Especially for a job description that clearly have that inherent risk. So they employees already know the risk for their position. If her/she cannot do the job then he/she should be replaced.

It is ridiculous to have notions that employer have to take care employees that simply cannot do his/her job. If you hire someone to be a driver, company responsibility is to provide safe car to drive. If your driver is afraid that they can get hit by other car by driving normally and would not drive then you need to replace them.

[Cooldoe]

5 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

What a stupid thing to say. Employers are always responsible.

 

It's beyond me how people don't know these things. It's YOUR responsibility as an employer to create a safe work environment or it is YOUR right as an employee to work in a safe work environment.

The uninformed "men strong, men must endure" attitude is uncalled for.

And this is the classic fallacy of relative privation.

Safe work environment does not include safety from the world. It is not employer job to baby their employee. Their job is a you said provide safe work environment.

And yes this include harassment free workplace in the office but it does not extent outside of work environment .

 

 

[Ezzy-525]

On 8/16/2023 at 9:12 AM, CantHelpMyself said:

Deletes the forum, buys twitter, deletes that. then reddit, etc.

X Tech Tips.

[Cooldoe]

10 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

You have a very strong opinion for such little knowledge.

Occupational hazard means ANY HAZARD emerging from the job even if it's outside the control of the employer. It doesn't matter if it's weather or other people or anything else. So yes, the potential psychological impact of content moderation is absolutely an occupational hazard.

 

No it does not.

Even in the CCOHC quote you post the language clearly mention 'reasonable' and not any hazzard that you are implying.

The hazzard example also mention about physical hazzard.

 

You also seem to forget that technically Linus is also an employee in LMG so he also should be protected in the same way you are referring to

 

[digitalscream]

12 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

You have a very strong opinion for such little knowledge.

Occupational hazard means ANY HAZARD emerging from the job even if it's outside the control of the employer. It doesn't matter if it's weather or other people or anything else. So yes, the potential psychological impact of content moderation is absolutely an occupational hazard.

 

Exactly - and, if it wasn't part of her duties listed in her contract (given that OF isn't actually social media, it's a content monetisation platform), then she should have had the choice rather than having it dropped on her. And then, when she raised concerns about it, she should've been able to back away from it.

 

Remember, "safe" in the context of a work environment doesn't just mean physically. As someone who's run an...errr...adult private social networking site, I can confirm that the daily interactions involved in it really can take a toll on your mental state. If it hadn't been for the fact that I made bags of cash from it, there is no way in hell I'd have done it - especially not for the low wages she would have been on.

[leadeater]

20 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

You have a very strong opinion for such little knowledge.

Occupational hazard means ANY HAZARD emerging from the job even if it's outside the control of the employer. It doesn't matter if it's weather or other people or anything else. So yes, the potential psychological impact of content moderation is absolutely an occupational hazard.

What exactly do you propose to put in place to protect an employee from this? And lets also consider that as the Social Media Manager that does not actually mean they are responsible for or required to deal with all aspects of communication with the community. Linus has personal accounts on the forum, Twitter, email address etc and it is not the Social Media Manager's role nor do they have access to those. So Linus or any employee has the potential to receive direct objectional material, so do we the moderation team.

 

It is also the responsibility of an employee to act in accordance of any work place safety guidelines whether those be 'hard risks' or 'soft risks'. It is the responsibility of the employer to create those frameworks and procedures and provide any necessary equipment and training.

 

If you are going to use a drill or lathe then the employer shall provide the safety equipment and the employee shall use them. Potential negligence exists on both sides, not using it (employee) and not providing it (employer).

 

Above example which some use the terminology of 'hard risks' are much easier to define and talk about, they are objective and measurable risks. On the other hand 'soft risks' are a lot more complicated and this is what companies find the most difficult to deal with however the same responsibilities for the employee and employer still exist.

 

An employer can never prevent any and all risks, even with safety equipment. They are only required to have the frameworks, procedures, safety equipment and ensure they are being followed and deal with any violations or negligence.

 

This is not an uncomplicated discussion topic.

 

P.S. I will not be commenting on any specific things like the OnlyFans account, you all can discuss that as you like, respectfully but you also need to be fair to other members opinions and discussion points as well.

[Cooldoe]

8 minutes ago, digitalscream said:

Exactly - and, if it wasn't part of her duties listed in her contract (given that OF isn't actually social media, it's a content monetisation platform), then she should have had the choice rather than having it dropped on her. And then, when she raised concerns about it, she should've been able to back away from it.

 

Remember, "safe" in the context of a work environment doesn't just mean physically. As someone who's run an...errr...adult private social networking site, I can confirm that the daily interactions involved in it really can take a toll on your mental state. If it hadn't been for the fact that I made bags of cash from it, there is no way in hell I'd have done it - especially not for the low wages she would have been on.

This come back to my previous point that the possibility if harm is not as big as people implies as OF is content monetization not a porn site. As I clearly pointed out the risk of obscene pic in twitter/x is much more compared to member only content monetization platform

 

As far as I know most content monetization usually fall under social media manager job as well though as something like patheon is managed by them.

[digitalscream]

19 minutes ago, Cooldoe said:

This come back to my previous point that the possibility if harm is not as big as people implies as OF is content monetization not a porn site. As I clearly pointed out the risk of obscene pic in twitter/x is much more compared to member only content monetization platform

 

As far as I know most content monetization usually fall under social media manager job as well though as something like patheon is managed by them.

It's an adult content monetisation site - let's not kid ourselves that it's anything but 95% porn, populated by 99% men with inhibition issues when it comes to unsolicited dick pics and the like.

 

And as soon as word got around that it was a young woman running the LTT account on there, the vast majority of content she'd have to deal with would be exactly that. It's absolutely not the same as Twitter/Facebook/etc, because those sites have rules explicitly prohibiting that kind of thing and it'll result in the account being banned (well, it used to...can't speak for it now that Our Lord and Saviour has taken over). Hell, I run a reasonably popular forum with accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Patreon and I've never had any pictures of man-parts sent to me. In fact, I've never come across that kind of thing with the social media accounts for any place I've worked at apart from the adult site. But then...that might be because none of them had an OnlyFans account.

 

I don't have a problem with bullshit like that (I'm basically immune, as per my previous post), but I'd imagine - as she made clear - that it's very different for a young woman in her first proper job. She did exactly the right thing by flagging that she wasn't comfortable with it, and whoever she reported it to did exactly the wrong thing by effectively telling her to suck it up and deal with it.

 

"Yeah, we know it wasn't in her contract to deal with our joke account on an adult content site, but y'know...it was only a joke, so it's OK that we overrode her objections" isn't going to fly in an employment tribunal, no matter how much you think it was her job.

[BigFatTeddy]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

You have a very strong opinion for such little knowledge.

Occupational hazard means ANY HAZARD emerging from the job even if it's outside the control of the employer. It doesn't matter if it's weather or other people or anything else. So yes, the potential psychological impact of content moderation is absolutely an occupational hazard.

 

Okay, seriously, I think you are overshooting here very very far. And to my experience, I would see most courts settling on my side of the table than yours. But you believe whatever you want to believe, at least in my experience, your stance is so extreme that no one will be able to satisfy it and therefore could be called unrealistic.

[BigFatTeddy]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

Nowhere is it saying "reasonable" or "it's you choice as an employer what you think is a hazard".

It even states "possible hazards".

Yes, you're perfectly right about this. But what's not stated here is that I must enable everybody to do a specific job. So, of course, I can find an agreement with staff to accept specific risks. This is standard practice in every industry. A bus driver will accept the risk of having a car accident. The bus driver's employer will not be obligated to block every street the bus drives through to prevent all risks. The same logic applies to all tasks and jobs out there.

 

So, if my expectation as an employer is that you have to deal with the filth of OnlyFans, but it will cause you mental health issues, of course, there is the option to replace you as the person in charge with that with a person that will not have those issues. This is neither illegal nor morally questionable.

[BigFatTeddy]

1 hour ago, digitalscream said:

I don't have a problem with bullshit like that (I'm basically immune, as per my previous post), but I'd imagine - as she made clear - that it's very different for a young woman in her first proper job. She did exactly the right thing by flagging that she wasn't comfortable with it, and whoever she reported it to did exactly the wrong thing by effectively telling her to suck it up and deal with it.

This is very much true, the reaction - if it happened like described my Madison - is poor, unprofessional, and even in a smaller company completely inappropriate.

 

1 hour ago, digitalscream said:

"Yeah, we know it wasn't in her contract to deal with our joke account on an adult content site, but y'know...it was only a joke, so it's OK that we overrode her objections" isn't going to fly in an employment tribunal, no matter how much you think it was her job.

I would definitely be not so sure about that. Definitely not. Been there many times, and was surprised by the logic in court many times. Maybe, maybe not.

 

I personally think she did the right thing not dragging this to court because the risk for her, especially regarding her claims about mental health, outweigh the potential benefits by far.

[CrabbyDadTech]

So a sexual harassment allegation was worth a whopping four minutes, and it ends in an inappropriate office joke and laughter. LTT is a company run by man children. 

[hmfaysal]

14 minutes ago, CrabbyDadTech said:

So a sexual harassment allegation was worth a whopping four minutes, and it ends in an inappropriate office joke and laughter. LTT is a company run by man children. 

Yet here you are, posting on their forums. 

[Uttamattamakin]

14 minutes ago, CrabbyDadTech said:

So a sexual harassment allegation was worth a whopping four minutes, and it ends in an inappropriate office joke and laughter. LTT is a company run by man children. 

In James's defense ... if he was talking to Linus it's not sexual harassment.   Sexual harassment needs a power difference and/or a hostile work environment.  You can't harass the person who has their name on the building.  That person can FIRE you. 

[Cooldoe]

2 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

And another fallacy of relative privation to distract from the topic..

 

Now you are just making yourself look even worse, but I generously quote it again:

Nowhere is it saying "reasonable" or "it's you choice as an employer what you think is a hazard".

It even states "possible hazards".

Since you always want to drag the discussion to Linus himself, the CEO and owner and therefore the employer at the time, how could he with his own experiences being harassed online, not flag harassment as a possible hazard of a social media manager?!?!? Shocking!

 

You are cutting the paragraph before that that clearly discuss about reasonable care.

 

Any social media person will face the internet. There is no expectations that someone will handhold anyone with the job. If someone need to be protected from any possible interaction then the no point to hire that person. The cost to hand hold that person would outweigh the benefit that the employee can bring.

Company job is to make money to pay the employees not to guardrail the employees 

[Cooldoe]

2 hours ago, digitalscream said:

It's an adult content monetisation site - let's not kid ourselves that it's anything but 95% porn, populated by 99% men with inhibition issues when it comes to unsolicited dick pics and the like.

 

And as soon as word got around that it was a young woman running the LTT account on there, the vast majority of content she'd have to deal with would be exactly that. It's absolutely not the same as Twitter/Facebook/etc, because those sites have rules explicitly prohibiting that kind of thing and it'll result in the account being banned (well, it used to...can't speak for it now that Our Lord and Saviour has taken over). Hell, I run a reasonably popular forum with accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Patreon and I've never had any pictures of man-parts sent to me. In fact, I've never come across that kind of thing with the social media accounts for any place I've worked at apart from the adult site. But then...that might be because none of them had an OnlyFans account.

 

I don't have a problem with bullshit like that (I'm basically immune, as per my previous post), but I'd imagine - as she made clear - that it's very different for a young woman in her first proper job. She did exactly the right thing by flagging that she wasn't comfortable with it, and whoever she reported it to did exactly the wrong thing by effectively telling her to suck it up and deal with it.

 

"Yeah, we know it wasn't in her contract to deal with our joke account on an adult content site, but y'know...it was only a joke, so it's OK that we overrode her objections" isn't going to fly in an employment tribunal, no matter how much you think it was her job.

You are equating pornhub to onlyfans but their business model is totally different. There is no way for you to contact anyone from LTT OF is you are not subscribed. You need to subscribed to LTT joke account before you can even view the content.

As they are not actively promoting the account and was there in short time to fulfill obligations to some community member that register in the OF site. Regular OF member does not have any incentive to join LTT OF account so in many ways it is separate from other OF content. You will find more adult content in twitter.

Besides there is never disclose she run the OF account before. The one they disclose to the public is other male member. But I can be wrong here as it been a while.

[Mertrodome]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

What exactly do you propose to put in place to protect an employee from this?

I'm not the person you were replying to, but one way to safeguard employees would be to ensure there is always more than one person available who is trained to handle it, with a process in place where someone can say "I'm not in a good spot to be doing this right now" and request someone else take over for the hour/day/whatever. Obviously this could be open to abuse, but I don't think H&S policy should be formed around whether or not someone could technically use it to avoid work. You have to somewhat trust your employees to use the system for its intended purpose. And of course "I can't do the Twitter mentions today" doesn't mean "I'm going to do no work in place of that".

 

You could also rank each platform's risk - nothing too complicated, maybe 0-4 or 0-2, but on both the likelihood of something happening (e.g. unsolicited NSFW content, death threats, etc) and the severity and impact of it happening on the employee's wellbeing. Multiply the two scores together and you have an overall risk rating, from which you could set policies like amount of "risk score" taken on at any given time, or share the load between two or more employees etc.

 

This is a fairly stadnard way of handling risk assessment, the only difference here is that it's a risk to mental, rather than physical, health and so is a little trickier to get right. But if it's considered a workplace hazard, which the person you replied to clearly did, then it does warrant such a risk assessment. Building in redundancy and spreading the risk load then seem like good first steps toward minimising the exposure any one employee has to this particular hazard.

 

To be clear, I do think LMG did do some version of what I mentioned above (spreading the role of moderation on different platforms, like you pointed out), but where I suspect it fell down was that the addition of OnlyFans probably warranted its own special consideration and risk assessment, given the nature of it. I'm not going to say they definitely didn't of course, I've no idea, but it's good practice regardless.

 

In the physical space, it'd be like getting a new forklift which operates similarly to, but differently in some key ways, to ones you already have. That'd be a no-brainer in terms of risk assessment and training needs. People tend not to think of mental health in quite those same terms, but they should imo.

 

It's also the sort of thing that you arguably don't need to do or doesn't occur to you when you're a small startup and everyone's pitching in, but can be problematic when you grow beyond a certain size and you can't rely on employees being able to just say they need help directly. I can totally see LMG not realising, or it being a product of rapid growth that it wasn't fleshed out yet. Hindsight is 20/20 after all. So I don't blame them as such, more just trying to constructively suggest ways in which it could be learned from.

[m9x3mos]

47 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

In James's defense ... if he was talking to Linus it's not sexual harassment.   Sexual harassment needs a power difference and/or a hostile work environment.  You can't harass the person who has their name on the building.  That person can FIRE you. 

Nope, that's not how that works. 

That person can fire you for sexual harassment. Which with evidence would be okay and not a violation of Canadian work contracts. 

[digitalscream]

29 minutes ago, Cooldoe said:

You are equating pornhub to onlyfans but their business model is totally different. There is no way for you to contact anyone from LTT OF is you are not subscribed. You need to subscribed to LTT joke account before you can even view the content.

As they are not actively promoting the account and was there in short time to fulfill obligations to some community member that register in the OF site. Regular OF member does not have any incentive to join LTT OF account so in many ways it is separate from other OF content. You will find more adult content in twitter.

Besides there is never disclose she run the OF account before. The one they disclose to the public is other male member. But I can be wrong here as it been a while.

I never mentioned Pornhub. I have no idea where you got that from.

[Uttamattamakin]

6 minutes ago, m9x3mos said:

Nope, that's not how that works. 

That person can fire you for sexual harassment. Which with evidence would be okay and not a violation of Canadian work contracts. 

That's what I said.  An employee can't really sexually harass and employer.  Make the employer uncomfortable in that way and you  get fired or reprimanded or something.   The power imbalance is key to the concept.  

In Madison's case, being the newest hire, the least connected person and jr to everyone means she would be in a vulnerable position to being harassed.

[Cooldoe]

3 minutes ago, digitalscream said:

I never mentioned Pornhub. I have no idea where you got that from.

I am talking about how you think madison will exposed to the content of other of channels and how people can easily msg her.

That is just not how onlyfans works. Their business model is closer to how patheon work and more on content monetization platform.

You need to pay subscription fee to just view the post

[The Shining Wizard]

Taran has spoken up about this:

 

 

 

[Uttamattamakin]

6 minutes ago, Cooldoe said:

I am talking about how you think madison will exposed to the content of other of channels and how people can easily msg her.

That is just not how onlyfans works. Their business model is closer to how patheon work and more on content monetization platform.

You need to pay subscription fee to just view the post

In practice though the only ones who post on Only Fans are posting porn.  

[BigFatTeddy]

15 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

No, you cannot find an agreement with staff. In which world are you living? This would open the door for shady employers to pressure their employees into unnecessary risks. It would be highly unacceptable!

 

And your example with a bus driver just shows a complete lack of understanding how risk assessment works. There are in fact many layers of measures implemented to prevent accidents altogether and reduce repercussions of accidents. What do you think an airbag or the seatbelt is? A technical measure to reduce injury. Or the drivers licence? It's an organisational measure to ensure proper training. There are mandatory medical exams. There is regular mandatory retraining. The workspace has to be ergonomic to prevent adverse health effects from sitting all day long and operating a bus. The list goes on and on to achieve an acceptable level of risk (not a risk-free environment - which would be utopistic).

And this is done for ALL workspaces and tasks. It doesn't matter if a person is just sitting on a desk, you are obligated by law to do a proper risk assessment. And I'm talking from a European/German perspective about these things, so details may differ, but from what I read on the CCOHS website, the basic principles are identical. And why shouldn't they in a developed country?

Any employer who ignores risk assessment on occupational hazards is simply unqualified to employ people.

Pal, your approach to risk management is overboard. And you're also confusing threats, risks, and regulations. The whole purpose of regulation is to exculpate organizations from specific risk domains and NOT have to manage those risks. I truly hope this is not your profession and your take on this is that of an "ambitioned amateur", because if we'd ever meet in a corporate domain, that would be... not fun for you. I have been doing this for 25+ years and I can promise you: Your ALL RISKS for ALL WORKSPACE and ALL TASKS is just bullshit. That's not how risk management works, in no domain.

 

Please, let's stop here... let's just agree to disagree. Else we might find out you work in one of my teams and we'd not be friends anymore...