Gadgetory

- In 2017, Facebook announced it would expand the number of people it had working on safety and security to 30000, 15000 of which would be content moderators. Content moderation is a really difficult job. You have to take Facebook's policies, which can change every day, and then apply them to decide what stays up on Facebook and Instagram and what comes down. A couple of months ago, I was contacted by some moderators who worked for Facebook in Tampa, Florida through a company called Cognizant, and they told me that they wanted to go on the record. Now, this is a really big deal. Everyone who works for Cognizant signs a lengthy nondisclosure agreement in which they pledge not to talk about the work that they're doing. But the moderators who I met in Florida told me that they wanted to tell their story to the world so that we all could understand what it's like to do this job day to day and about the longterm mental health consequences of policing the biggest social network in the world. (somber music) - [GPS] Take the next left onto West Avenue. - [Shawn] I was ecstatic. I thought I was gonna climb the corporate ladder. I thought, you know, this is Facebook, I'm gonna be doing some really good stuff. - Um, I thought I was gonna be reading Facebook posts all day, so people going, you know, everybody posts their business on Facebook, so I was gonna read everybody's stuff and then be able to, you know, decide if it has to stay up or come down, so, I thought it would be a fun job. (somber music) - [Casey] What did they tell you the job was gonna be like? - [Shawn] Basically they told me that I would be going onto like high profile social media accounts, such as like Disney World or like Animal Orlando, and I'd be doing kind of like some data searching, like seeing what types of posts most people react to and comment to and like to. - At what point did it become clear to you that you weren't going to be helping businesses on Facebook? - Uh, probably the second or third day of training, and basically we had an outline of what we were doing and none of it was business, it was graphic violence, hate speech, sexual solicitation, sexual exploitation, that kind of stuff. - So they told you we're gonna put you in a queue of content that is dedicated to graphic violence, and hate speech? - Yes. You would get the occasional random thing, but for the most part, it was always graphic violence and hate speech, because that's all that was coming in for us. - Did anybody ask you about your mental health before they assigned you to that queue? - Nobody ever asked about my mental health there, yeah. Nobody said anything about mental health. (somber music) - [Casey] What were like some of the kinds of things that you would see that would be really hard for you? - [Michelle] Oh, where do I start? Um, animals, mostly animals, the abuse of animals. I've seen them, had a puppy with a rope hanging it, and I've seen a pit of pigs and they threw fire and you can hear the pigs screaming. I don't wanna get emotional talking about the animals. - There was one where there was a baby that was, they were twin babies. - [Michelle] Twin babies. - From like Saudi Arabia, and the mother was dropping the baby on the ground. This is one we saw over and over again, and then choked the baby, and you hear the baby gurgling, and trying to breathe, and for days, it infected my mind. I had to know what happened to this baby because I'd seen it over and over and over again, and luckily the baby was okay. (sighing) (sobbing) - Sorry, um. - [Casey] It's okay. (sighing) - I just think about all the animals all the time, and that's what I'm still thinking about, even though I left. - [Casey] Yeah. Do you remember the first video that you saw? - It was a video in a different language, and it was these two teenagers, and they came across an iguana on the street, and one of the kids grabbed the iguana by the tail and they started to smash the iguana onto the ground, and you could just hear the iguana screaming. And that was one of the first videos I saw on that queue. - [Casey] Yeah. - And they just, they kept slamming the iguana onto the ground, and the iguana just kept screaming and screaming, and then the screaming stopped. It was just a bloody pile, and the kids were just laughing at the iguana. - Were you able to remove that video from Facebook? - No, since that video had no title and no caption, we were supposed to send it to a different queue for Spanish speaking. But I don't there really was a Spanish speaking queue that was taking care of that. - Killing an animal on screen, uploading that to Facebook, at least when you worked there, that was okay? - That was okay. (sighing) I just think about that. And we're not helping the animals either, we're not, not even humans, we're not even helping humans. I have seen videos of a babysitter choking a toddler to death and giving bloody noses to babies, and it stays, and nobody does anything, and it's just there, it's always there. You have to always look at it. You always see death, every single day. You see pain and suffering. And it just makes you angry, because they're not doing anything. The stuff that does get deleted, it winds up back there anyway. (somber music) - [Michelle] Maybe a psychological test would help, because, you know, some people can handle certain things than others, and maybe they won't be affected with PTSD or any anxiety or whatever the case may be that could come from seeing this stuff over and over again. - How did you get through it during the day? - I ate. When you look at bad stuff all day, sometimes you just wanna eat something sweet to make you feel better. - How else did you change while you were doing this work? - I was very snappy with everybody. I had night terrors, like almost every night. I was only getting like an hour or two of sleep because I was just so, I was just always thinking about the content, the videos, the pictures, the people and the animals that were basically, you know, their whole deaths were broadcast. Like the most cruel things imaginable. Just, it's there, and it's allowed to be there. - Did you go talk to somebody about your night terrors? - Yes, I did. I went to a mental health facility in Clear Water, and they diagnosed me with PTSD. They gave me some medication for night terrors. They also prescribed me some Xanax. It really has helped a lot with my sleeping. I'm able to sleep again. Just knowing that there's this kind of stuff still going on just scares the heck out of me. It's terrifying to know that that stuff is real. (somber music) - [Casey] So Facebook has told me they don't have quotas for how many jobs that moderators are supposed to do. How did you feel when you were there? - There's a quota. - Yeah, what is it? - Well, it started where it used to be higher, like 354, was it? And then, right about the time we left, it was, they're like well, we want to at least do two, 250 a day. That's a quota to me, if you're telling me to do that many jobs. - What is the score? - Oh, the score. You're supposed to be getting a 96 to 98 percent, but nobody in our training class actually got anywhere close to that. Everybody was in the eighties, including myself. - So the basic idea of the score is that the 15000 moderators it has around the world should be executing their policies perfectly and they should be taking down everything that should be taken down and leaving up everything that should be taken up, and they should do that with a 98 percent degree of accuracy? - That is correct. - But it's not happening in practice, because as you're just saying, the policies are changing how often? (laughing) - Daily. - How much pressure is there on moderators to keep that score high? - That's their main focus. - That's probably the main focus there, and every day, it's, you've got bad quality, you've gotta send it back, you've gotta do, like, all the time, you've gotta do disputes on this, oh, why is your quality so low? Every day, every day. - Every day there they're sort of hammering that home, that you need to be perfect. (somber music) Walk us through, like, your average day doing this job. - You sat at your desk, you put on your headphones, and you worked all day. No one came to comfort you. If you were upset, no one came to talk to you throughout the day. If you turned around to talk to a friend, you were being screamed at for not looking at your content and doing your work. They say all the time okay, we have these counselors here to help you, but we've got nine minutes of wellness every day. So I'm supposed to go talk to this counselor about the 500 videos I've looked at today in nine minutes and I'm supposed to be okay? It doesn't make any sense. - It's a toxic environment. The higher ups don't really care. They're very nonchalant about the problems that are there, such as workers having sex in the building. People are drinking alcohol and smoking weed in the parking lot. Just a lot of sexual harassment going on from the higher ups to the content moderators. And there was a problem of the bathrooms. Some employees thought it was funny to smear feces all over the stalls and urinate on the floor. - And how many bathrooms are there for the 800 employees that work there? - One bathroom. There is one bathroom in the entire building. - Why didn't you quit while you were doing this job? - Well, as I said before, the market was tough. It's tough down here, and you know, I had such difficulties finding a job and I was scared to find another job, and it was also just kind of something weird, that the managers would always tell the employees where it's like, uh, oh, if you quit, you're gonna have to go back to call centers, because like I guess like that was the only thing that a lot of these people did, was call centers. - So they're reminding you, this is the best you can do around here. - Yes. (laughter) - For 15 dollars an hour? (laughter) - I was actually really excited for that, because in college, all my professors were like you know, you wanna get that good 30000 dollars starting entry level job. - Absolutely disgusting. Always the desks were disgusting, pubic hairs on the desks. Boogers on the desks. They never did a fire drill because they said Facebook wouldn't let us off the content to do a fire drill and one time, Facebook was coming to visit, and the day before, they had every manager painting and cleaning the building so it would look presentable for Facebook, and that just proves that Cognizant knew it was not acceptable for the building to be in this condition. It's like a sweatshop in America, it really is. All they care about is getting that content moved through. (somber music) As long as you were sitting in your desk not talking to anybody else and doing your content, they were happy. It didn't matter. Nobody there matters. - What do you think people should know about this job that they don't already? - When I actually got into all of this, and they explained what I was really doing, they made it feel like you were going to make a difference on social media, and there were going to be people and animals that you could help bring justice to. You're not doing that at all. All that you're doing is covering up Facebook's mistakes. - Hey, thanks for watching, and if you want to know more about our ever changing social networks and their effects on the world, I invite you to subscribe to my daily newsletter The Interface, you can find it at theverge.com/interface. And of course if you want more great videos from the Verge subscribe to this channel.