Facebook responds to devastating story about content moderators

Facebook’s army of content moderators — contract workers paid as little as $28,000 a year — spend their days sifting through some of the social network’s most extreme content, work that can have a lasting impact on their mental health and wellbeing. But the companies employing these workers are often ill-equipped to deal with the needs of their employees.

That’s the conclusion of a devastating new report in The Verge that details the sometimes harrowing working conditions at an Arizona facility that employs hundreds of Facebook moderators. Among the unsettling details:

• Initial training that’s so intense some “fail out of the program before they can start”

• Employees who “cope with the stress of the job… with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes”

• Insufficient onsite counseling services

• One employee, who feared retribution from disgruntled coworkers, who secretly took a gun to work “to protect himself”

• Employees who begin to believe the conspiracy theories they’re supposed to be moderating

• A constant fear of being fired “for making just a few errors a week”

Now, Facebook’s VP of operations, Justin Osofsky, says the company will do more to make sure its contractors are taken care of. In a statement, which makes no reference to the story in The Verge, Osofsky said, “we are committed to working with our partners to demand a high level of support for their employees.”

At the same time, he defended Facebook’s work with organizations like Cognizant, the company employing workers at the Arizona facility. “These partnerships are important because they allow us to work with established companies who have a core competency in this type of work and who are able to help us ramp with location and language support quickly.”

In order to improve conditions for employees, he said Facebook is working to standardize its contracts, and gather more feedback. The company is also setting up a “whistleblower hotline” so contractors can reach Facebook directly, rather than solely relying on their own HR teams.

“We want to continue to hear from our content reviewers, our partners and even the media – who hold us accountable and give us the opportunity to improve.”