And for the 1,000 people like Chloe moderating content for Facebook at the Phoenix site, and for 15,000 content reviewers around the world, today is just another day at the office.Ĭhloe’s story begins “ The Trauma Floor,” Casey Newton’s disturbing depiction in The Verge regarding “the secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.” That story, and a follow-up piece Newton did in June, titled “ Bodies in Seats,” portray the human toll involved in trying to tamp down the internet’s most offensive content.Ī great deal has been written about the downsides of our new ‘attention economy.’ This piece focuses on just one of those downsides: how social media companies’ choice to make “engagement” their holy grail intersects with a dark aspect of human nature - our deep, sometimes desperate, need for attention. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. She presses “Play” to begin a clip that neither she nor her classmates have seen before. When it’s her turn, Chloe takes her place at the front of the room.
Now, in a culmination of sorts, Chloe will moderate a Facebook post while standing in front of her fellow trainees. A key part of the training has involved trying to harden herself against a daily barrage of the internet’s most disturbing posts - all manner of hate speech, torture, violence, and pornography. Chloe is training for, arguably, the internet’s most difficult job: full-time content moderator - aka “process executive” - for Facebook (though actually employed by a subcontractor named Cognizant).
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