i would basically just come in
find out what my target is for the day
press the button
just go and the first piece of content
boom
it's just there on the screen in front
of you you take a look
you make a decision you press a couple
of buttons it goes away and the next one
loads
and the next one and the next one and
you are seeing dead bodies
and murders or people celebrating having
killed somebody
dogs being barbecued alive and you
are seeing these images it took me a
long time
to understand how much this stuff had
affected me
i never even believed in ptsd i thought
it was just people being
useless and it's been very hard for me
to find
these really difficult emotional
reactions when i talk about this stuff
i've had to be through therapy and take
a lot of time just working on myself
to get through this
[Music]
i used to work for facebook and my job
was to spend
eight hours a day looking at all the
worst things that people post
online so that you don't have to see it
mark zuckerberg had just announced he
wanted to hire
thousands and thousands more people to
do this work
and i think they just needed bombs on
seats so i was
snapped up they did ask me you do
understand that maybe
occasionally you might see something
that's a bit disturbing and they ask if
you're okay with that
but you don't have any experiential
understanding of what that means
it's really difficult to quantify how
much of it was of a particular type or
how extreme it was
you would be able to quantify this but
it but these numbers are not available
facebook have them but as an employee
you're not entitled to find out what
kind of harmful material you've been
exposed
to i'm gonna guess it's between five and
ten percent
of what you see every day is possibly
potentially traumatizing i can remember
the first one that
just was a like a wow moment and that
was when we
first started i got this one one day and
it's a super
close-up shot of a man
just jerking off but uh i didn't want to
reach forward put my hand into that
space to press the buttons to delete it
and eventually one of the girls did it
and then she picked up uh there was a
packet of wet wipes
on another desk for cleaning the desk
and she cleaned all the desks the
keyboard
and her own hands before she went back
to her desk
thinking about that later i realized
that we really do feel
like touched by what you see and then a
couple of weeks later one of my
colleagues
got his first self-harming incident
where
somebody is cutting their wrists and
seem to be in imminent danger of
committing suicide
we just heard this like shouting this
guy just shouting like
what do i do i've got a suicide
what do i do and he was
in a complete panic because there's a
life
at risk right in front of him right
there and then and your job
is to protect people well the guidelines
are not guidelines they're very very
strict very precisely written
rules we've got definitions of harm
versus injury versus violence
we've got clear definitions of what is
hate speech and what isn't hate speech
your head is swimming with all of these
issues and
things that you have to consider every
time that you're confronted with this
stuff
i think it would be easier to deal with
the images
if you weren't having to think about
them so deeply
i worked uh the evening shift so i would
start at six pm
finish at two two o'clock in the morning
but then you would often wake up
three four hours later you'd suddenly
sit up in bed remembering the decision
that you've made and realizing that
you've made a mistake
right i've missed a nipple you you
remember some image that you'd seen and
you've suddenly realized that there was
a naked girl on one side or
an isis flag in the background so now it
should have been deleted under the
terrorism policy
so you're obviously replaying this stuff
in your head unconsciously while you're
asleep
but then you're not allowed to talk
about your work with anybody
we've all signed non-disclosure
agreements the facebook murder
we've all been told again and again
don't ever tell anybody what your job is
there was a wellness team on site and
they were responsible for
resilience training and mental health
issues
but they're not trained psychotherapists
psychologists they're not mental health
professionals so you're at work and you
get an email coming around saying hey
we're having
finger painting in the canteen this
evening i'm here to save the world
i'm looking at war crimes and child
abuse
i haven't got time to go in finger
painting so it was window dressing the
supports that were there were totally
inadequate
for me there was a creeping awareness
and a loss
of faith a lot of hope
and it's just become this mindless
drudgery where you've desensitized
yourself
from what you're seeing on the screen in
front of you but when i left i was just
relieved and and then i got a phone call
from a journalist
somebody had given them my number and
she wanted to talk to me
off the record like this about the job
and she asked me these questions that
you've been asking me about
the content the stuff that you see and
it was the first time
i had addressed that that i that i faced
it
and it completely overwhelmed me and i i
broke down and cried in a coffee shop
i was lost i just didn't know what the
i was doing what was going on i was
totally
bewildered you know as i started to get
my head around it and talk to
specialists and doctors and other people
i realized that this job had knocked me
on my ass and i hadn't even realized it
facebook denies that anybody could ever
get ptsd
nobody has been harmed that's very
explicit and then there was a recording
somebody actually taped what mark
zuckerberg was saying
in an internal meeting with employees
last year and mark zuckerberg said
it's a little bit over dramatic he's
just totally just dismissed
all of the criticisms that have been
made it's denial
they don't want to know what's going on
and they'll say the right things they
say things that sound good
but they don't care mark
zuckerberg
i don't care what he's been told by
other people these stories have been
repeated enough times now that he needs
to go down
onto the shop floor and see how people
work day in and day out
see what's happening and talk to people
who've been harmed
and embrace the fact that he's got a
problem he needs to solve
[Music]
you