The Horrors of Moderation

A group of Kenyan employees have been diagnosed with "severe" PTSD because of their jobs -- as moderators on Facebook.
More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away. 

3 comments:

james said...

True, but you and I are probably not hanging out in the more evil corners of the online world.

Christopher B said...

Was talking with a former co-worker whose daughter is in the first year or two of teaching HS art. She's been shown some pretty graphic stuff by the kids in her school so I can believe it shows up though probably not in wide circulation.

Anonymous said...

When you could still get videos pulled from Ewe-Tube for promoting jihad, I had to watch through at least 3/4 of the length of the Al Quaeda beheading videos and the like in order to file a removal request with proper documentation. I didn’t get PTSD (or at least it didn’t make my pre-existing PTS worse), but I didn’t watch for hours a day, every day.

LittleRed1