-We've covered, in the last few years,
the crisis that's enveloping the technology industry --
Russian meddling, live suicides, incoming regulation,
and basically how this industry
that has grown to touch everyone's life,
how it has run roughshod with our data.
And now the consequences are becoming apparent,
and it seems like it's this big moment of reckoning.
The Post broke the story of the Russian ads on Facebook.
This was the most critical story that's ever come to my beat.
You could just see that things were turning --
the conversation about smartphone addiction,
the conversation about livestreaming suicides,
are these products good for the world, censorship.
And it just changed almost overnight.
-Very small amount of the content influenced the election,
in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea, right?
And it's -- -Right after the election,
Mark Zuckerberg goes onstage and dismisses the idea
that fake news had anything to do with the election.
Even though on the outside, they're telling the world,
"This could never have had an impact on the election,"
they're actually starting to do a forensic
analysis of what happened.
The night before the hearings, Facebook announces,
"Okay, we're going to hire 10,000 moderators
to moderate content,"
and then they upped that to 20,000.
-We're gonna have more than 20,000 people
working on security and content review by the end of this year.
So it's going to be coupling continuing to grow the people
who are doing review in these places with building AI tools,
which we're working as quickly as we can on that,
but some of the stuff is just hard.
-And, then, very shortly after,
Google makes almost an identical announcement.
I call them up after these announcements,
and, again, I asked my same questions
that I asked earlier that year --
"So, where are you gonna get these people?
Where are you gonna hire them?
How are they trained? How much are they paid?
Where do they work?"
Like, nothing.
You get no information.
And yet, they're touting this workforce in Congress
as the key to their strategy for saving democracy
and protecting themselves.
You know, if you're a reporter
and someone doesn't give you information,
that's always a red flag,
and that always makes you hungry for more.
I did find out that a lot of the workers
were based in the Philippines,
the hub of a call-center economy,
and there's this whole new kind of job -- content moderator.
The job boards are just filling up with openings.
It's just exploded.
It's this boom for content moderation for this kind of job.
So at that point, I thought,
"Okay, we should go to the Philippines,
'cause, you know, it's a boom town
for Silicon Valley's dirty work,
and yet, we've never heard these people's voices.
We don't know what the impact of the job is on them."
Manila is an enormous megacity full of skyscrapers,
but the skyscrapers all have American names.
You know, there's JPMorgan.
There's Citigroup.
There's Accenture.
They have more malls in the Philippines
than any other place in the world.
There's over 100 malls in Manila alone.
Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and others are located in malls.
So we spent a lot of time hanging out in the mall,
near the Baskin-Robbins and the Uniqlos and European brands,
hanging out in these smoking areas,
and learning just what the rhythm of their life was like.
When I first met Lester, I said,
"You know, why do you want to talk to me"?
And he said, "Well --" he says, "You know, I just --
people shouldn't be doing this job."
He was, like, really clear. He was like,
"I would tell anybody who started this job that,
'You think it's not going to affect you,
but it starts to affect you,
and it can affect you in really bad ways.
'" If you have this routine exposure
to watching people commit suicide,
and you're somebody who struggled
with depression or anxiety,
you may start thinking about suicide yourself.
It's so well-known to tech companies
that this is a problem that it comes up in their training.
It's called suicidal ideation.
He had thought about suicide in his 20s.
He's now in his 30s. He had thought about suicide.
He had not attempted suicide.
But it was something that he had thought about,
but he really thought that he had gotten over it.
And then he realized that as he started doing the job,
and he said he saw beheadings, murders.
But for him, it was like the suicides were a big trigger,
because he had been depressed before.
We talked to more than three dozen moderators
around the world, and I can tell you
that that's not an uncommon thing.
And I wouldn't say for everyone, because there's plenty of people
who told us they were not affected,
but there seems to be a portion of people
who are seriously affected by this job.
He now says that, even all these months later, when he goes to,
like, a tall building in the Philippines,
he starts to think, "What if I jumped"?
We talked to one person who actually did attempt suicide,
and we talked to several people who had suicidal ideation.
Even people who like the job say,
"Yeah, nightmares are part of it."
Like, I asked someone, "Have you ever had nightmares"?
They said, "Well, obviously."
And this is a person who likes the job.
It's a job that's traumatic and that causes a form of PTSD.
These workers over there in this foreign country,
that aren't even full-time employees,
that get paid significantly less,
and yet they're doing in some ways
the hardest jobs of the company.
And they're protecting the world's free speech --
you know, letting us see our friend's birthday pictures
and not child porn.
What are the responsibilities of the companies
that employ people in this boom job?
I mean, that's the other big takeaway from the story.
This job isn't going away.
All people ever talk about is automation
and the day that technology is going to automate workers,
and it's going to happen.
No one in Silicon Valley
believes these jobs are gonna disappear.
I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in April,
and I asked him the question.
I said, "Do you think that there will be a time
when you'll have no humans doing this job"?
And he said, "There are always going to be humans."
And it's the same thing when I talk to Twitter
and I talk to YouTube, that there's
this acknowledgement in Silicon Valley
that with the scale of their problems,
the human part is not going away.
And so if the human part isn't going away,
what are our responsibilities to these humans?
And that is something that society has not worked out.