Project Uolo at Appen: Work from Home for Facebook
Project Uolo is a social media evaluator job at Appen whose client is Facebook. In this work from home project, the rater must evaluate the credibility of the content published online and help to identify the fake news. To do this, you will be asked to research and evaluate information made in different contents.
The purpose of the project is to better understand the information shared on Facebook, in terms of how individuals assess its credibility after doing some research.
How to Apply
To apply for the Uolo Project, it must be available in the All Projects dashboard of Appen Connect. In some cases, the Appen recruitment team will send emails to the agents inviting them to apply for the project.
One of the requirements to participate in Uolo is to have an active Facebook account with at least 25 friends. To increase your chances of being successful, make sure to read our 7-step guide on how to work from home with Appen.
Uolo Project Pay
The hourly rate for the Uolo Project has a great variability depending on the location of the evaluator, ranging between $3.50 and $15.00.
As in the other Appen projects, you can see the amount to be invoiced for Project Uolo by clicking on the My Invoices tab. You can also monitor the changes in the billing as the worked hours increase every week.
Invoices are self-generated from the working tool metrics. You should review the invoice every month, on the first day.
If you think some modifications should be made, based on your own controls, you propose the adjustment to the Appen financial team. Some Reddit users state that they have had to claim to Appen for errors in the calculation of the time billed.
If you agree with the total amount you send the invoice for approval and, after that, Appen transfers the funds to your Payoneer account within the first two weeks of each month.
If you don't have a Payoneer account yet, you can sign up through this link to get a $25 bonus. The bonus is released once you receive $1,000 in payments to your account.
Workload
As a social media evaluator working on Project Uolo, you will be required to work 20 hours weekly (4 hours from Monday to Friday), If needed, you can work during the weekend to complete the 20 hours. All work is online and completed remotely. Sometimes, extra hours are available, and you receive a notification from the project support team letting you know how many additional hours you can work.
The work is online and done remotely through a Facebook tool known as SRT. If the agent has not previously participated in a project that is developed on this platform, they must wait for an email inviting them to create a user on it.
Exam
When the agent considers that they are sufficiently prepared after studying the guidelines, they must take the qualification exam. This consists of 13 questions of which at least 10 must be answered correctly. The correct answers to the test questions will be displayed at the end for learning purposes.
The agent has the possibility to take the exam twice. If on none of the occasions you achieve the required score, you will be disqualified from the process.
Important Note
Participation in this project requires giving consent for Facebook to have access to your personal information and your activity on this network. When you click on the exam access button, Appen displays a disclosure that must be accepted in order to proceed to answer the questionnaire.
This implies accepting that Appen will have access, not only to basic information, but will also collect information about religion and political ideas-ideology. In the same way, it is granted that Facebook has access to the user account in that network. That includes all the activity, the times that you log in, the comments, the groups to which you belong or leave, the people or the accounts that you follow, the purchases you make from its affiliates and every time you click on the Like button of Facebook, etc., for nine months.
Although the stated objective of requesting approval of access to all the aforementioned information is to take into account the biases of the evaluator, this requires a high level of knowledge of everything related to private life. Appen is aware of this fact and therefore advises that participation in this project is entirely voluntary and that the agent may choose to work on other of the many projects offered by the company.
Uolo Project Guidelines
When the project Uolo is available in the Dashboard, you can click on the button Learn More button. Once on the project page, you will have access to the guidelines and additional material with some examples.
The guide to perform the evaluation process consists of 27 pages. In this type of work, the presence of a certain degree of subjectivity in the assessment is inevitable. This is a significant cause of variability in the responses of the raters. Appen makes it clear that this document is not final but evolves with the process of evaluation. To do this, Appen takes into account the responses that raters give to the questions in SRT and the feedback it receives from them.
Below you will find a very brief outline of the content of the guide.
The guide begins with two basic definitions for the development of the tasks: Central Claim and Statement of Fact. It is important to adhere to these definitions.
The task is divided into two parts, each with its own rating queue.
- Task A: Content Description
- Task B: Claim Assessment
In the Task A queue, you will be asked to provide some information about the context of various pieces of content.
The contents to be evaluated are shown in the project work tool, SRT. Once the content is displayed, the first step is to decide if it qualifies for evaluation or not.
The Task B Queue will focus on identifying, researching, and evaluating the central claim stated in photo content.
Examples of a Task
The following images and comments are taken from the project guidelines.
- Sometimes the content text provides a description of what is shown/happening in the photo(s).
- In these cases, the central claim you should evaluate is whether the photos are actually photos of the thing described in the caption (in this example: “the photo shows a giant bat found by the Peruvian army near the Amazon Jungle.”).
- Sometimes content text is about something someone said.
- In this case, the claim you should evaluate is whether the person made the statement shown in the content text (in this example, the central claim is: “Bill Murray said: 'So, if we lie to the government it's a felony. But if they lie to us its politics.'”)
- For this type of content, you should not evaluate whether the information in the statement is true, unless the content also makes a claim about whether the statement is true or false