Facebook moderators describe devastating impact of work

Moderating content on Facebook leaves psychological scars, say current and former moderators in harrowing testimonies published yesterday.

Despite efforts to improve conditions for the company’s thousands of contractors, the whistle-blowers tell The Guardian that some workers become “addicted” to graphic content and take to collecting extreme examples for their personal use.

Some were pushed towards the far right due to the sheer volume of hate speech and fake news they read every day.

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Weeks after The Irish Times reported that moderators are to take Facebook to court for “psychological trauma,” The Guardian says that contractors are “ground down by the volume of the work, numbed by the graphic violence, nudity and bullying”.

It revealed that workers have to view such content for eight hours a day, working nights and weekends, for “practically minimum pay”.

Initially, workers had been required to moderate 1,000 pieces of content each day – more than one every 30 seconds over an eight-hour shift.

After a report earlier this year in the technology site The Verge, the cap was reduced to between 400 and 500 tickets each day. But this cap still forces workers to read a ticket each minute.

The most distressing part of the role involved checking private conversations between adults and minors that had been flagged by algorithms as potential examples of sexual exploitation.

A moderator said the dialogues were “violating and creepy”. He added: “You understand something more about this sort of dystopic society we are building every day.

“We have rich white men from Europe, from the US, writing to children from the Philippines… they try to get sexual photos in exchange for $10 or $20.”

A worker speaking in The Verge article said that a former moderator “now sleeps with a gun at his side” after he was traumatised by footage of a stabbing.

A similar testimony appeared in The Guardian’s article. A moderator said he found a colleague “checking online, looking to purchase a Taser, because he started to feel scared about others. He confessed he was really concerned about walking through the streets at night, for example, or being surrounded by foreign people.”

Another moderator said that though it is “important” to create a team to protect users from “abusers, hate speech, racial prejudice” he wanted to “open a debate about this job”.

He added: “We need to share our stories, because people don’t know anything about us, about our job, about what we do to earn a living.”

In a statement, Facebook said: “Content moderators do vital work to keep our community safe, and we take our responsibility to ensure their wellbeing incredibly seriously. We work closely with our partners to ensure they provide the support people need, including training, psychological support and technology to limit their exposure to graphic content.

“Content moderation is a new and challenging industry, so we are always learning and looking to improve how it is managed. We take any reports that our high standards are not being met seriously and are working with our partner to look into these concerns.”