Facebook moderators are still haunted about the content they see while policing the platform’s most toxic areas, months after the company promised reforms.
Current and former contract workers for Facebook’s moderation centers in Berlin spoke to the Guardian about their mental health troubles, as well as changes they’ve noticed in colleagues. Many workers have grown “addicted” to graphic content while others have apparently adopted far-right political views.
“You understand something more about this sort of dystopic society we are building every day,” one moderator said. “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.”
Another moderator, identified only as Daniel because workers must sign nondisclosure agreements to work for Facebook, said some of his coworkers had grown skeptical of immigrants and more open immigration policies. Daniel said the ideological shift may come from the amount of “fake news” moderators must read online.
“Once, I found a colleague of ours checking online, looking to purchase a Taser, because he started to feel scared about others,” Daniel said. “He confessed he was really concerned about walking through the streets at night, for example, or being surrounded by foreign people.”
“Maybe because all this hate speech we have to face every day affects our political view somehow. So a normal person, a liberal person, maybe also a progressive person, can get more conservative, more concerned about issues like migrants for example,” Daniel added. “Indeed, many of the hate speech contents we receive on a daily basis are fake news … which aim to share very particular political views.”
