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- Part of the job description was,
"You will be part of a team
"that protects free speech online,"
which makes it seem very heroic.
It felt like you were putting on a cape working at Google.
- Over the past year, I've been reporting on the lives
of Facebook's content moderators in America
and they've told me about their low pay,
their dire working conditions and in some cases,
the long term mental health consequences
of doing the work that they do.
A content moderator is kind of like
a police officer for the internet.
If you ever see something that you think
doesn't belong on a site and you report it,
that report is gonna be reviewed by a human being.
While a lot of what they see is really benign,
like spam, for example, some of it's really disturbing.
I'm talking about murder, terrorism and child exploitation.
Recently, I started seeing out people who did
this kind of work for Google and YouTube.
I wanted to see how their experiences compared
to the ones I had heard about already.
What I did learn surprised me.
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- Part of doing our job and how they would make
us feel better about it was that,
"You guys see this so other people don't have to see this."
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- Over the course of my reporting,
I talked to both people who worked at Google full time
and people who had been hired
on through third-party contractors.
It became clear to me that no matter who hired you,
doing this job over a long enough time period
can cause significant mental health consequences.
But it also became clear to me that there is
a big difference in how Google employees get treated
and how those third-party contractors get treated.
Today, a former full-time Google employee
named Daisy Soderberg-Rivken is going on the record
to talk about her experiences as a content moderator.
She had access to all the perks and all the benefits
that come with being a full-time Google employee.
But at the end of that day, that didn't save her
from the consequences of doing the job.
- I was a legal root removals associate,
which is a very fancy way of saying I was
a content moderator at Google.
- Let's talk about what the job actually was.
You show up, you have your orientation,
you sit down at your computer, it's time to do your job.
What is your job?
- You usually start your work by going through a queue.
So you're assigned to a queue based on either
an issue area or a geographic area.
I focused on the French market,
because my first languages were French and English
and I also worked on our child sexual abuse imagery cases
and our terrorism cases.
- And you were working primarily on web search, right?
- Yes, we as in-house content moderators,
we would usually handle more high level, complex issues.
Certain things that were very high volumes,
such as defamation and copyright were typically
sent over to contractors.
They would then escalate to us if it was kind
of a gray area, but if it was even a gray area for us,
we would then escalate to our council.
It was kind of levels of how specialized we were.
- At what point did you start to feel like you
were seeing more disturbing stuff than you expected?
- Very early on.
They said we would be analyzing child sexual abuse imagery
but I remember clearly, in parentheses, it said,
this kind of content would be limited to one
to two hours per week, when in reality,
we were understaffed, so we would be in there
sometimes five, six hours a week,
which sounds like nothing, but it's actually...
- Oh, it sounds like a lot. - It's a lot.
- Yeah, yeah.
When do you first notice that doing this job
was starting to affect your mental health?
- When I was walking around San Francisco, actually,
and I was with one of my friends and we saw
a group of kids, toddlers,
that were hanging on to one of those ropes
so that they don't go far.
I looked at them and then, I kind of blinked once,
and suddenly, I just had a flash of images
of some of the images I had seen, children being tied up,
children being raped, at that age.
This is three, three years old.
I kind of like stopped and I was kind of blinking a lot
and my friend had to make sure I was okay
and I had to sit down for a second
and I just exploded crying.
She was like, "What just happened?"
And I couldn't explain it to her and I just,
these racing thoughts and then, an instant panic attack.
I was having nightmares, I wasn't sleeping,
I had spent multiple days just crying in the bathroom.
I was having all of these panic attacks.
My work productivity just dipped.
Finally, my manager was like,
"Listen, we really need you
"to step up your productivity game."
I just snapped and I turned to him and I said,
"Do you understand what we're looking at
"and we're not machines, we're humans.
"So we have emotions and those emotions
"are deeply scarred by looking at children
"being raped all the time and people getting
"their heads chopped off."
It was like there was no escape and yeah,
I finally snapped and they took that as,
oh, she needs to take a second, she needs to breathe.
And I was said, "No, I need to leave."
The free food, the nap pods, all these benefits,
this doesn't mean anything if this is,
if this is my day-to-day.
- Daisy helped me understand how hard this job is to
do even when you work in the greatest office in the world.
But the truth is that most people don't work
in an office half that nice.
One of Google's biggest projects that it has
to moderate, of course, is YouTube.
When it comes to YouTube,
Google has decided to give most of the work
of content moderation to third-party contractors.
Recently, I went to Austin, Texas, to meet with a group
of moderators who work for Accenture on the YouTube project.
Specifically, they work on what is called the VE queue.
VE standing for violent extremism.
120 times a day,
they review YouTube videos that have terrorism,
graphic violence and other disturbing content.
You're about to hear from one of them
and we've altered the audio to protect their identity.
- [Moderator] So, at the beginning,
they told you to watch some videos.
You're going to take some actions.
You will apply the YouTube polices.
But you don't feel how this is going to impact you.
- In some ways, the content moderators who do this work
for Google and YouTube are treated better
than the ones who work for Facebook.
Most prominently, they get two hours of break time each day.
Basically, two hours of paid leave in which they
can recover from the challenges of doing this work.
But, most of them aren't able
to take a full two hours a day.
- [Moderator] They're forcing you, micromanaging you
to have to be sitting on the desk five hours and a half.
And if you don't, there is going to be a punishments.
The schedules will be changed.
You will be on night shift.
And this is going to affect my wellness time.
I will never take my three hours.
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- [Casey] What kind of things do they
do that make life hard?
- [Moderator] They always have complaints about everyone.
You know, like, I have something on you.
If you make any problems, you know what?
This is the reason that I can fire you.
- [Casey] Right, right.
- [Moderator] One of the things that they always saying
is if we miss one agent tomorrow, we get another 10.
- [Casey] So they're constantly reminding you
how easily you can be replaced?
- [Moderator] Yes.
The problem that's they feel stuck somewhere.
They can't leave the work
because they have responsibilities.
He have bills right now he have to pay.
- [Casey] So it sounds like people feel kind of trapped.
- [Moderator] They are.
Yeah, that's a good word.
- When I brought all this to Google,
the company told me that it takes the health
of its workers very seriously and pointed out
that it offers onsite counseling to both
its full-time employees and to its contractors.
I think it's worth pointing out, though,
that even though Daisy had access to that onsite counseling,
the counselor she had ultimately told her
to go seek outside help and get a therapist.
Daisy also eventually took medical leave
and ultimately got an emotional support animal to help her.
It's a dog named Stella.
- Hi five.
Found a psychiatrist and I found a therapist.
The psychiatrist put me on antidepressants.
I was diagnosed with chronic anxiety and PTSD.
And then, I started seeing a therapist just to talk
through these things and she said,
"Is legal removals associate anything close
"to a content moderator?"
And I said, "It is a content moderator."
And she said, "Trust me when I say you are not
"the first person that I've seen
"with this particular issue."
- It seems like recovering from doing this job
has itself been a full time job.
- Oh, yeah.
Whenever someone talks to me about content moderation,
I say, "I'm a recovering content moderator."
They're like, "Oh, you talk about it like it's,
"it's like alcoholism."
And I said, "Well, you never fully recover."
- One of the things that is so interesting to me
about your story is that you are one of the very few people
I've talked to who did content moderation as
a full time employee of a company, rather than a contractor.
You had access to six months of paid medical leave.
A contractor who's moderating for YouTube in Austin
doesn't have that same access.
- I had those months to think about my choices
and to think about ways out without having
to deal with unemployment or having to deal with
how am I gonna pay rent.
I know those contractors don't have that opportunity.
- The contractors I've talked with in Austin
,are making $18.50 an hour, about $37,000 a year.
Does that seem like a high enough wage given some
of the risks involved?
- Absolutely not.
There's never gonna be enough money to make this okay.
I'm gonna be clear about that.
But, I think that you need to pay contractors proportional
to what they're going through, the impact of their work,
because this is so vital to the business.
- Let's put a fine point on it.
If Google can't exist without the work that you did, right,
like you were responding to official legal requests
from governments-- - Yup.
- That would have otherwise shut Google down
in their country-- - Yup.
- If you didn't respond.
- Exactly.
- So this is very high stakes work.
And yet, for some reason,
these companies have just chosen not to value it.
- Yeah, I think that contractors are so essential,
especially considering how much volume we have.
We need as many people as we can doing this work.
We also need to change the overall system
and the overall structure of how this work is being done,
how we support these people, how we give them tools
and resources to deal with these things.
Or else, these problems are only gonna get worse.
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- Hey, thanks for watching and don't leaven any comments.
It will only create more work for the content moderators.
But, if you want to know more about what's going on
with our wayward tech platforms, I write a daily newletter
called, The Interface, about the collision between
big social networks and democracy.
You can find it and subscribe for free
at theverge.com/interface.
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