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An obvious but significant question that jumped out at me after reading Sarah Roberts’ “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work,” was what the psychological toll looked like after reviewing racist, homophobic, violent, or misogynistic content? The article said that “working in CCM means putting aside one’s personal belief system and morality,” but as the article showed (with the Max Breen example, p. 152) and as other interviews and articles demonstrate, this is not true. Another article by Sarah Roberts titled, “Behind the Screen: The People and Politics of Commercial Content Moderation” continues the story of Max Breen, and quoted him saying, “I can’t imagine anyone who does [this] job and is able to just walk out at the end of their shift and just be done. You dwell on it, whether you want to or not.”
The article on Wired, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” goes into more detail and personal accounts of the psychological weight that this job brings. The problem is that a lot of these outsource workers come from minimal education and experience, so a lot of them are hourly workers rather than full-time workers. If they are not full-time workers, then they do not receive health benefits and cannot receive help for the psychological issues the job instills. A New York Times article, “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precinct,” tells that co-workers rely on each other for emotional support. The article also tells about an industry group established by Congress called the Online Safety and Technology Working Group submitted a request to the national Telecommunications and Information Administration for therapeutic care to content moderators with long exposure to inappropriate content.
Screenshot of report by the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, 2010 (p. 91).
While this is a step in the right direction, it is specifically addressing workers who deal with images of child sexual abuse, and as we have learned, there is much more content than that. This report was filed back in 2010, and I couldn’t find any more recent updates than that, which speaks to the slowness of legislation and that this injustice to content moderators is not an urgent issue to the government. But without them, the internet would be significantly more disturbing.
*Title comes from a quote by psychologist Patricia M. Laperal of Behavioral Dynamics, as reported in Brad Stone’s New York Times article cited.
Works Cited
Chen, Adrian. “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” Wired, Conde Nast. 23 Oct. 2014.
Online Safety and Technology Working Group. “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.” National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), 4 June 2010.
Roberts, Sarah T. “Behind the Screen: The People and Politics of Commercial Content Moderation.” Open Transcripts. 2 May 2016.
Stone, Brad. “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts.” The New York Times. 18 July 2010.
Posted from Intro to Digital Studies by Lauren C.