The Verges Casey Newton found that some employees of Cognizant one of many companies around the globe that provide the human labor behind the social networks moderation process worked in a chaotic environment and often experienced severe trauma from looking at hate speech and violent media all day long.
The initial report found that contractors often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and regularly adopt the fringe and conspiratorial beliefs of the posts they were moderating. The same contractors deal with strictly managed breaks and unrealistic benchmarks and often burn out of the job due to the emotional and mental toll the job took on their personal lives.
A subsequent Bloomberg report published this morning confirms that many of these issues are not isolated to Cognizant, but endemic to the US moderation industry. After hearing about how contractors at the similar moderation firm Accenture were not allowed to leave the building or answer personal phone calls during the work day, employees of Facebook itself began expressing concern on internal messaging boards, Bloomberg reports.
The auditing systems described by Osofsky are aimed at preventing harsh working conditions, but they were largely in place before The Verges report on Cognizant.
Managers at Facebook reportedly feel contract labor is the only way to properly screen all the user-uploaded content every day in multiple languages around the world, at least until the company can deploy more sophisticated artificial intelligence. According to Bloombergs Sarah Frier, use of contract labor for moderation may be in part because of the legal risk full-time employees would bring if they were able to sue for psychological trauma on the job.
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