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Facebook: Report focuses on moderator hell in Tampa, Florida

Who wants to see children screaming (seemingly) organs are removed while alive? Or how animals are tortured, maimed and beaten to death? And yet there are apparently people who upload videos to Facebook.

Facebook has around 15,000 moderators who check such videos – i.e. watch them – and may have to remove them. Most of them are employed by external service providers. Working conditions at some of these companies are catastrophic. A particularly blatant case describes the journalist Casey Newton from “The Verge”.

First Arizona, now Florida

Newton had already reported in February about the US service provider Cognizant working for Facebook, more precisely: about conditions at Cognizant in Phoenix, Arizona. There was, as he described it, employees and former employees, pressure, fear, chaos, drug use.

Things are no better at Cognizant in Tampa, Florida. In any case, this impression results from the descriptions of a dozen current and former moderators, which Newton compiled in his new article. Three of them were even prepared to break their confidentiality obligation and be quoted by name.

The picture that emerges is devastating: the office and the toilets are filthy, sexual harassment and threats of violence are dismissed or completely ignored by management, and drug consumption to cope with the extremely psychologically stressful work cannot be overlooked. Employees would be lured into the job with false promises, and anyone who gets sick must expect to lose it quickly. The pressure to have to meet certain requirements from Facebook adds to the horrifying content that every moderator has to check.

In March, a 42-year-old cognizant employee in Tampa collapsed at his desk and died a short time later in the hospital. Cause of death: heart attack. Some colleagues had given first aid, but there was no defibrillator in the office.

When visiting the reporter, everything is clean

When Newton was allowed to visit the office, he was given a clean working environment, and it smelled of cleaning agents. Managers chatted with the moderators, there was a yoga room and a break room with a small Buddha figure. “It was all a show,” one employee later assured the reporter, just as it always happens when a Facebook representative comes by.

The fact that there are still enough people who want to do the job is probably due to the payment: moderators in Tampa earn at least $ 15 an hour, the minimum wage in Florida is only $ 8.46.

Cognizant is not the only Facebook service provider that is criticized for its dealings with employees. End of 2016 published the “SZ-Magazin” Anonymous reports from employees of the Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato, the German partner of Facebook, whose extinguishing team works in Berlin. There was talk of time pressure, overload, opaque regulations and lack of psychological care.

The Berlin State Office for Occupational Safety, Health Protection and Technical Safety (LAGetSi) then checked Arvato three times. The company had “taken measures to reduce the mental strain on the employees, for example advisory services, because of the LAGetSi controls,” it said in one Minutes of the meeting of the Berlin House of Representatives from March 2017.

Facebook plans improvements

The documentary “The Cleaners” from 2018 also shows poorly paid moderators in the Philippines. You have to check thousands of gruesome Facebook content, such as beheading videos and filmed child abuse, in eight to ten hour shifts under extreme time pressure. An employee who had asked for transfer several times without success committed suicide.

The reports from Phoenix and Tampa, Berlin and Manila affect only a part of the Facebook moderators. In March 2018 Facebook reportedto now have a little more than 20 such locations worldwide. The fact that the working conditions in four of them are or were critical or unacceptable says nothing about the other locations.

The fact that Facebook has recognized that it has to take more care of the extinguishing teams, however, is clear from the announcements Casey Newton lists in his Tampa article: Contract workers in the US should start in mid-2020 at least three dollars more received per hour. Facebook wants to make unannounced visits more often in the future. In addition, the partner companies should no longer be evaluated solely on the basis of their numbers, but also, among other things, for their efforts to ensure the well-being of employees.

A person responsible for Facebook hopes that the company will also eventually offer psychological counseling to ex-moderators who have given up their job due to health problems.

Note: According to a fact check, the video of organ harvesting from children mentioned at the beginning of the text shows something different. That was unclear when the article from “The Verge” was published. Like the US medium, we now also point this out with a link to the fact check.

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