“There are surely some content moderators that haven't suffered mental health problems connected to the job, but I haven't met them,” says sociologist and computer scientist Milagros Miceli, who has studied the content moderation industry for the past six years. “I have no doubt that content moderation, like coal mining, is a hazardous job.” Coal mining, known for the proliferation of ‘black lung disease', is a classic example of a hazardous job, but there are only approximately 200,000 coal (…)
  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    57·
    4 days ago

    “If something you see is really difficult then you can leave your desk, but at that moment you have to remember to put on your computer that you are on ‘wellbeing’,” explains Eyvazzadeh. “But if the supervisors think you are using wellbeing more than you should, they will intervene. They would say: ‘Your ‘production’ time is a bit lower than expected, you have been on wellbeing a lot.’ So you are pressured to increase your time on ‘production’ by decreasing your ‘wellbeing.’”

    It’s bad enough we make overseas workers spend all day pulling the lever of a slot machine that yields mis-flagged puppy videos and gruesome beheadings with equal likelihood, but then we stack NDAs, legal obstacles, surveillance, and KPI admonishment on top of it.

    If you wrote this in a sci-fi novel, your editor would say “that’s a little cartoonishly evil, isn’t it?”

    Edit: Oh, health privacy violations and union-busting too. Classy stuff!

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      We have a company in Oklahoma that moderates tiltok they get a 30 minute wellbeing time period. Including their regular breaks. But they see sone pretty fucked up shit. Just saying it’s not just overseas people we make to do this stuff.