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• FACEBOOK MODERATOR CASEY NEWTON FREE

"And if a moderator makes the wrong call more than a handful of times during the week, their job could be at risk."

"Every piece of content that gets reported on Facebook needs to be evaluated by a moderator to see if it breaks the rules or not," Newton said. As Newton cites in his story, that number is just short of half of the 30,000-plus employees Facebook hired by the end of 2018 to work on safety and security. Worldwide, 15,000 moderators contracted by the company spend their workday wading through racism, conspiracy theories and violence. One way Facebook has responded is by hiring a small army of mostly contract labor to manage the abundance of flagged content.

FACEBOOK MODERATOR CASEY NEWTON FREE

At the same time, it has also been accused of wielding too heavy a hand in censoring free speech. Non-disclosure agreements, drawn up to protect employees from users who might be angry about a content decision, prevent the employees from talking about their work, according to Newton.ĭespite continued promises from Facebook leadership to prioritize safety on the platform, the company has come under scrutiny for its failure to curb the spread of propaganda, hate speech and other harmful content. In Newton's story, the moderators describe a low-paying, high-stress job with limited allowance to process the emotional toll of the work. In a recent article for The Verge titled "The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America," a dozen current and former employees of one of the company's contractors, Cognizant, talked to Newton about the mental health costs of spending hour after hour monitoring graphic content.

(Facebook is a financial supporter of NPR.) "There are people in the world who spend a lot of time just sort of uploading the worst of humanity onto Facebook and Instagram," Casey Newton, the Silicon Valley editor for The Verge, said in an interview with NPR's Scott Simon.Īnd the moderators contracted by Facebook are on the front lines of this fight. Without the work of social media moderators, your timelines and news feeds would feel a lot darker.