The bleak life of a social media moderator, and a few thoughts on censorship

I read an interesting article in The Week recently about the mental scars suffered by social media moderators, as a result of being exposed to so much negative content, but I’m left wondering whether this isn’t just a distraction away from increasing spread of censorship on social media more generally?

The harsh life of a social media moderator

Facebook has trebled its number of moderators in the last few months up to 15 000, and Google and Twitter also employ thousands of people in this role. Media Corporations and large online companies such as Amazon also employ their own teams.

Today, there is an invisible army (of mainly women) working for these social media platforms and other companies whose job it is to trawl through posts and comments and delete the ones which breach the company’s rules.

This is a job which primarily involves engaging on a daily basis with sexism, racism, bullying, porn and graphic violence, or in the words of one ex-moderator, Rachel Holdsworth, ‘the drip-drip banality of hatred’.

These companies have been pressurised into policing content on their platforms following a series of recent scandals such as the use of troll farms employed via Facebook and Twitter to influence the U.S presidential elections and of Instagram’s alleged role in contributing to the suicides of teenagers by feeding them images of self-harm.

You might say that this kind of development is inevitable, given the sheer growth of social media in recent years making it so difficult to track content – what with hundreds of hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, tens of millions of tweets being made every hour, and Facebook hosting well over a billion users!

These tens of thousands of people are basically an army of online censors, but here I don’t want to focus on the politics or morality of censoring online content, I want to focus on the effect that being exposed to the ‘drip-drip banality of evil’ has on the moderators, which is something that is often not considered.

The material that these moderators are exposed to has got more and more extreme, especially in the past four years, with videos becoming more common in comment threads (making it more difficult to rely on AI).

There seems to be a process of the ‘normalisation of nastiness’ occurring on social media – cliques and bullies seem to be routinely seeking out groups they are opposed to and trolling them – women’s sports feeds are trolled by Misogynists and Indian charities by Pakistani racists, for example. Even disability groups have their trolls.

Experimental psychologist Professor Lucy Bowes argues that being exposed to such negative material such as hate speech and violent images in the long term can have a cumulative negative effect – It is correlated with depression, low self-esteem and anxiety.

The Verge recently published an investigation into Cognizant, a U.S company that provides moderation services for numerous large social media companies. It found that many workers were concerned about their mental health and that workers had developed coping mechanisms such as smoking cannabis and having sex in stairwells during breaks (trauma bonding).

The effects on some moderators have even been likened to those found in post-traumatic stress disorder, so perhaps referring to them as an ‘army’ of moderators is very appropriate!?!

To return to the fact of censorship….

While I do feel pity for these workers, stuck in their crap jobs suffering this mental health burden (I put this firmly in the ‘Amazon order picker’ category of worst crap-jobs you could be doing!), and think it’s worth raising awareness of this, I’m left wondering whether this issue isn’t something of a distraction away from the issue of censorship on social media more generally.

The narrative of the article is that ‘here’s a job that must be done’, but what about the poor workers, it’s much the same logic as ‘Help for Heroes’ – forget about the bigger political picture of why there is war and censorship and just feel sympathy for the troops on the ground who are fighting the just/ necessary war.

Perhaps instead we need to be focussing more on the issue of the extent of censorship on these platforms more generally. @careywedler Very recently posted a video on @dtube frustrated at the fact that anti-media has been banned from Facebook and Twitter – and that decision would have been taken much higher up the power structure – many chains of command removed from the ‘army’ of moderators soaking up the stress of removing hate-comments.

But having said that, if Mark Zukerberg gets told by the neo-cons to remove peace-media, you can guarantee that Mark Zukerberg is going to be telling his army of censors to remove comments which try to alert people to that fact!

The problem is, we’d never know, because many moderators work from home for agencies, so they are removed and isolated, and they have to sign non-disclosure agreements, meaning they can’t tell us about the comments they’ve been removing (at least until they leave or decide they don’t care I guess).

As a final word, maybe it would be better to just sack the censors, and see what happens – maybe a little more exposure to the reality of the extent of online hate wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing?

Sources

The Times – Life as a Social Media Moderator

The Week - 16 March 2018.

The Verge – The Trauma Floor (and image source 2)

Image source 1