Everyone is experiencing a moment of rupture. A crash A specific video or two, that everyone remembers. The content moderators who work subcontracted for Meta in Barcelona and have had to take sick leave due to post-traumatic stress agree on this point. There is a moment when they can't take it anymore. For the Italian L. – all employees have signed strict confidentiality clauses and speak under a false identity – it was a recording of cannibalism (she explained it in detail to this newspaper), which was followed by one of the savage tortures inflicted by a gang of drug traffickers to a girl from a rival gang.
The company that works for Meta, Telus, has around 20% of its workforce on leave, basically due to the harshness of the content they must filter, as La Vanguardia published yesterday. One of them yesterday filed the first criminal complaint against Telus (which absorbed CCC Barcelona Digital Services in 2020, the first subcontracted by Meta) for crimes against workers' rights, injuries due to serious negligence and against integrity. moral. Other employees who litigate through employment are also considering taking this step.
The affected workers have described in detail to this newspaper the process that has led them, in some cases, to be under severe psychiatric treatment. They denounce in all cases that the structural measures offered by the company were insufficient for the type of work they carried out. There was a team of psychologists 24 hours a day, whose main recipe was to “talk” about the brutalities seen in the filtering queue, they explain. When the talk was over, they had to get back to work.
Those affected consider that, in addition to not having received all the information about the type of work they were going to carry out, the relentless schedule control is the worst way to organize an office of this type. It works under high pressure and with few exhaust valves.
“When you start, they ask you if you have ever seen graphic content and how you have reacted. Everyone says yes, I had seen the video of the Islamic State beheading James Foley. But it is one thing to watch a video once and another to be prepared for this work. It crushes you silently. The first symptom was that I was having a hard time sleeping. My roommates began to tell me that I talked in my sleep, that I screamed, that I ground my teeth a lot. The images started to come to me in flashes, cramps went up my legs and if I'm not sitting I fell to the ground, it went up to my neck and head. Then I started having anxiety attacks. The first time I thought I was having a heart attack. “So I went to the doctor,” explained Brazilian R., 39, to this newspaper.
“The process is cumulative, it is not from one day to the next, and by the time you ask for help it is already too late,” explains J., a 31-year-old Brazilian employee. “You don't realize what's happening until you hit rock bottom,” adds Argentine H. “You put a barrier in front of your eyes, it's like a movie, until one day, being at home, you explode because of anything.” the Ecuadorian N is abundant.
Lawyer Diane Treanor, from the Irish firm Coleman Legal, who has filed 35 lawsuits against Meta from workers at different European content moderation centers (including some of them in Barcelona), estimates that “it is a type of work in which people usually last a short time, maximum two years. “Some of my clients have only been working for a few weeks and yet they have great psychological damage.”
The departments with the most employees are those in charge of filtering Spanish-speaking Latin American content and Portuguese-speaking content, with about 800 employees each. Many of them, expatriates from South America, have been prevented by circumstances from keeping their jobs: a salary of between 24,000 and 30,000 euros gross per year, which they would have difficulty accessing not only in their country, but in Barcelona; Some of them were also trapped by the pandemic, without any option to change jobs.
X., a young Brazilian who joined the company at the age of 19, spent eight months working and is still under psychiatric treatment five years later, describes the three psychological phases he went through. “The first is shock, the horror of discovering what people are capable of. It lasts two or three weeks. In the second phase you normalize all that horror. For me it is the worst, because you can be watching a child being raped by his father while you are talking to your partner about what you are going to have for dinner. You know that this is not normal, that it should affect you, but you are not capable of feeling empathy. And then comes phase three, where we go back to phase one. But crazy. It is the phase where I am, where everything that goes through my head is death, blood, pain, fear,” he says. “I believe that this type of work can only be endured by very strong people psychologically, strong in an extraordinary way, or psychopaths. I have seen people laughing while watching this type of content.”
An Italian moderator explains that the abundance of sexist content on the Internet, which she had to decide whether to label or not, had serious effects on her own self-perception: “I began to search for information in the androsphere, to become obsessed with my condition as a woman, I felt that I did not It was worth nothing. But I only understood it after talking to my psychologist.”
“One day I had a very strong crisis over some content. I went down to the psychologist and she made me talk for a long time. In the end I asked her what she should do and she told me: 'Exactly what we are doing, talking.' We have always had a great feeling of helplessness. On Valentine's Day, one of the psychologists appeared dressed as Cupid, offering chocolates. How ridiculous,” explains Mexican N.
“There are moments – he adds that there is a guy who seems to be killing you live and you have to be reading a PDF about Facebook's privacy policies because they changed them the day before and you have to make sure that he is violating them.” before deleting the content.” That is another aspect. Platforms live off traffic. The more people there and for longer, the better. They are income. Hence, filtering policies have surprising standards: “For Facebook, there is only a suicide attempt if a person cuts the veins on their arm vertically. If it is horizontal, it is considered only self-harm,” reveals a moderator.
“It is also the contrast,” says the Italian C.. It's hard that after these atrocities you start watching videos of influencers and their ideal and empty lives, people who, without doing anything, have millions of followers and are millionaires. "You don't know what reality is and what the network is."
The high number of casualties at Telus, combined with the ERTE and ERE that the company presented in March and August of this year, has generated strong tension among some sectors of workers. The Brazilian moderator explains that in the internal chats those who are still operational point out those who are on leave: “They say that because of us they are going to lose their jobs.” The accusations intensified yesterday. “There is a kind of internal bullying. Anyone who can't stand it should become a waiter, they say. They also say that we are on the decline, that we are liars, weak,” despite the fact that many of them are being treated in psychiatric services, in some cases with serious conditions. Some workers suspect that the company wants to move the workplace to countries with more lax labor laws; we talk about Bulgaria.
Cori Crider, lawyer and activist, co-founder of Fox Glove, a London-based NGO founded in 2019 to ensure fair use of technology, explains that “what the moderators repeat most is that their way of relating to technology has changed.” people. They become scared, hypervigilant, cynical people with panic attacks. One told me that he no longer trusted leaving her daughter, even with members of her family, after seeing so many videos of child abuse. It's horrible, isn't it? "It's horrible that social media, which is supposed to bring people together, has created this class, which we basically push out of society because we've forced them to watch dehumanizing content."
That is precisely X.'s feeling: “I think I will never return to normal. “It has changed me forever.”
