Moderators who filter extreme content for Google have revealed how workers routinely suffer from anxiety, depression and PTSD because of the hours of disturbing videos they are forced to watch each week.
They told how a team of largely Middle Eastern contractors in Austin, Texas, are used to filter terrorist content – watching up to 120 videos per day while being paid just $37,000 per year.
While regular Google staff can earn more than twice that amount for similar work, including looking at child abuse videos, one told how the job left her suffering PTSD so severe that she had to take six months off work.
Google content moderators have opened up about the stress, anxiety and PTSD they say they suffer as the result of looking at hours of brutal terrorist and child sex abuse videos (file)
Their accounts were revealed by The Verge, which interviewed current and former staff about their jobs.
One, identified only as Peter, said he was a Middle Eastern migrant who worked at an Accenture facility in Austin, which carries out moderation on behalf of Google.
He said most of the team are migrants, employed for their ability to speak Arabic which allows them to determine if some content is extremist or not.
Peter was first employed in 2017, following a pledge by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to increase the company’s moderation team to 10,000 members.
He told how he spends five hours per day watching extremist content including graphic beheadings and executions – despite a company pledge to reduce that to four hours.
He revealed how, in the last year alone, he has seen an employee suffer a breakdown at work after being unable to cope with what they had seen.
Another neglected themselves so badly due to depression that they had to be hospitalized with a vitamin deficiency.
Peter himself notices that he has gained weight and lost hair, has a shorter temper, and frequently feels stressed while coming into the office.
He said: ‘Every day you watch someone beheading someone, or someone shooting his girlfriend.
Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin, a Google staffer from California, said she had to take six months off work after suffering from panic attacks (file)
‘After that, you feel like wow, this world is really crazy. This makes you feel ill. You’re feeling there is nothing worth living for. Why are we doing this to each other?’
Meanwhile Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin, a former Google staffer in California, revealed how she was paid $75,000-per-year to ‘process legal requests and remove links.’
At first she was assigned to remove terror videos, focusing on the French terror attacks because she speaks the language, before she started being assigned more child abuse imagery.
While she was initially told she would view the abuse on a rotating basis, she ended up viewing graphic sexual material on a weekly basis, she claimed.
‘All the evil of humanity, just raining in on you,’ she said. ‘That’s what it felt like — like there was no escape.’
After a year on the job, her boyfriend told her that her personality had changed – she was talking and screaming in her sleep, suffering night terrors and was jumpy.
Then, while out with friends in San Francisco, she suffered her first panic attack after seeing a group of school children on a trip holding on to a rope to keep them from wandering off.
‘I saw the rope, and I pictured some of the content I saw with children and ropes. Children being tied up, children being raped at that age — three years old.
‘And suddenly I stopped, and I was blinking a lot, and my friend had to make sure I was okay. I had to sit down for a second, and I just exploded crying.’
Daisy ended up taking six months off work with PTSD, and had to get a therapy animal to help her relax and help her cope with her anxiety around children.
Google moderators said they view up to 120 videos per day for five hours per day, despite a company pledge to reduce that to four hours that was made last year
She eventually quit her job at Google and now works at a think-tank focusing on children and technology, but still has to take anti-depressants to balance her mood.
This is not the first time that concerns have been raised around the work done by content moderators.
In September, a report highlighted that some Facebook staff based in Berlin had become ‘addicted’ to graphic content – accumulating troves of objectionable media for their own personal archives.
Workers’ political and social views were also altered, driven by fake news and hate speech that they are forced to trawl through.
‘You understand something more about this sort of dystopic society we are building every day,’ said one moderator quoted by The Guardian who asked to remain anonymous after signing a non-disclosure agreement.
‘We have rich white men from, from the US, writing to children from the Philippines … they try to get sexual photos in exchange for $10 or $20.’
Accenture, which runs the YouTube moderation site in Texas, told The Verge that it ‘invests in our wellness programs to create a supportive workplace environment’.
Google said it is working on various techniques to reduce harm to its workers – including blurring videos, presenting them in black and white, and turning blood a green color – to reduce the harm caused.
The company said it is committed to getting moderators ‘the best support possible to be doing their job’.
Facebook added: ‘Content moderators do vital work to keep our community safe, and we take our responsibility to ensure their wellbeing incredibly seriously.’