Former social media content moderator shares the 'traumatising' things they saw while in the job
Warning: this article discusses themes that some readers may find distressing.
A former social media content moderator has revealed the dark side to the job, admitting at times it could be 'traumatising'.
The unidentified man sat down for an interview with VICE for the site's Informer series, discussing how working as a content moderator at Facebook impacted his life negatively.
During his time at the company, he had to sift through dozens of pieces of content per day and make difficult decisions regarding each one.
Advert
It wasn't until he left the company that he realised how much the role has impacted him, leading him to be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
The man, who launched legal action against Facebook, revealed that while employees were warned they may have to deal with 'disturbing' content, the amount was unspecified.
"But you don't have any experiential understanding of what that means. It's really difficult to quantify how much of it was of a particular type or how extreme it was. You should be able to quantify this, but these numbers are not available," he said.
"Facebook have them, but as an employee you're not entitled to find out what kind of harmful material you've been exposed to. I'm going to guess it's between five and ten percent of what you see everyday is possibly potentially traumatising."
Traumatic content including hate speech, porn and brutal violence are just some of the difficult topics the former Facebook employee had to deal with on a daily basis in his role.
He went on: "And you are seeing dead bodies and murders, or people celebrating having killed somebody. Dogs being barbecued alive. You are seeing these images. It took me a long time to understand how much this stuff had affected me."
The man revealed he didn't 'believe' in PTSD prior to his ordeal and eventually went through therapy to work through his issues.
"I never even believed in PTSD. I thought it was just people being useless," he admitted.
"And it's been very hard for me to find these really difficult emotional reactions when I talk about this stuff. And I've had to be through therapy and take a lot of time just working on myself to get through this."
The YouTube clip attracted huge attention from people, who were outraged by the former social content moderator's experiences.
"I can't even imagine being a person who sees all the darkest sides of humanity every single day!!! My respect to these moderators for having such a stable psyche," one person commented.
Another added: "Content moderators are the jobs that everyone doesn't want to do, but the world needs. Mad respect to all the moderators out there."
Topics: Technology, Social Media, Facebook
Danni King