--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about Facebook's $52 million settlement to its content moderators. Reporting by The Verge's Casey Newton was a game changer.
--:-- Noel King: That's right. And we're going to remind you exactly what this content moderation business is like. So here's a reminder from our episode last year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was called Friends Without Benefits.
--:-- Noel King: Casey started off with life at Cognizant. So at Cognizant, your time is managed down to the second. When Miguel wants to go to the bathroom, he needs to click a Chrome extension. He gets two 15-minute breaks a day. He gets one 30-minute lunch. And then he gets nine minutes a day of something called wellness time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The idea behind wellness time was if you saw a really disturbing video and you felt like you needed to stand up from your desk, take a walk around the block, maybe go see a counselor, that is the time that you can do that.
--:-- Noel King: They have also tried to add activities for employees over time. So there's like yoga. There's some meditation. But one of the things I found was that the sites are so crammed and the bathrooms are so few that often there would be long lines for the bathrooms on employees' breaks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, after they went to the bathroom, they might only have a couple of minutes to go to their locker, check their phone before they went back to work. So some people actually started using their wellness time to go to the bathroom.
--:-- Noel King: And then when Facebook found out about that, they sent down a directive that said, you are not allowed to use your wellness time to go to the bathroom.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of toll does looking at all of this stuff, like beheadings and drone strikes, take on people mentally?
--:-- Noel King: So it can leave you with either post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Some of the folks I spoke with said they had been diagnosed with PTSD. It might be more common for them to be diagnosed with something called secondary traumatic stress disorder, which is a very similar set of symptoms that people get when they witness other people's trauma.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the people I spoke with was a girl who I call Chloe in the piece and she had applied for this job right out of school. She didn't have any other immediate prospects, and because the job paid $15 an hour, that's $4 more than Arizona minimum wage, it seemed like maybe the best that she could do.
--:-- Noel King: So she took the job and was about three and a half weeks into training when she had to do this particularly grim exercise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the way the exercise works is you're in a room with all of your fellow trainees. There's a video screen on the wall. You walk up to a laptop and you hit play on some piece of content. And then the screen is going to show you something. And then it's your job to explain to everyone around you if it violates the community standards and if so, why, right? Kind of like a pop quiz type of feel.
--:-- Noel King: And so Chloe walks up and she hits play and she immediately starts to see a man who is being stabbed dozens of times. He's screaming, he's begging for his life and effectively he's being murdered, right? Chloe knows that it violates the rules to show someone being murdered on Facebook. So she explains that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as she does, she hears her voice shaking. She goes back to her seat. She finds that she can't concentrate. She has an overwhelming urge to sob. She leaves the room. She starts crying so hard that she has trouble breathing.
--:-- Noel King: And keep in mind that, you know, there are supervisors around her. No one has come out of the room to check on her. No one is trying to comfort her. No one is trying to get her resources. And Chloe actually leaves it to herself to go back into the room when she feels like she's put herself together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first thing she sees when she goes back into the room is that a drone is shooting people from the air and so she watches these bodies go limp while she's in the room and at that point she needs to leave.
--:-- Noel King: So she goes into the break room, she's sobbing, she goes into the bathroom, she's sobbing. Finally a supervisor finds her, kind of gives her this weak hug and says, yeah, you know, it's tough out there. Why don't you go see the counselor?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are counselors on these sites. They are not there all the time. They are there during large stretches of the day. And you can go see one if you're having a problem.
--:-- Noel King: So Chloe goes to see the counselor. And her takeaway from that meeting, after he kind of gives her some suggestions for how to cope with what is the first panic attack that she's ever had in her life, her takeaway is what this man is really trying to do is to get me back on that production floor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like his job is to get me back in operational shape so that I can go and review content, right? Like that is his primary concern.
--:-- Noel King: Now, what's interesting about that is many people actually are fired during training or leave shortly thereafter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, Chloe is someone who is still struggling with anxiety and panic attacks many months after she's left Cognizant.
--:-- Noel King: If she had left during training, she would have had this sort of long-term adverse mental health problem and absolutely no resources from either Cognizant or Facebook for, you know, this thing that never would have happened to her if she hadn't started the job.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing that really struck me reading your piece is like these people are protecting like all of us. They're like the guardians of our Facebook galaxy and yet they're paid not very well.
--:-- Noel King: And they're given these short breaks and their time is so structured. It's like, I mean, Facebook is one of like the richest companies in the world. Couldn't they just at least pay these contractors more?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Literally, yes. Sean, literally, yes. They made $6 billion in profits last quarter. That is money they're not spending on anything else.
--:-- Noel King: So they could take that money and they could pay these people more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the more that I reported on this story, the more this work came to feel to me like other work that first responders do, police officers, firefighters, social workers.
--:-- Noel King: And something that those jobs tend to have in common is that we recognize them as a society-level task that is so important that we all pay for them collectively with our taxes, right? Like, that is how important we see those jobs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And once your platform has scaled up to more than 2 billion people, which is how big Facebook and Instagram and the various other properties that Facebook owns are together, you have created a society.
--:-- Noel King: And yet, who is policing it? It is not, you know, all of us chipping in to make sure that these people are safe and supported and, you know, have pensions. It's people who are being paid $15 an hour.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You mentioned that Chloe left. What made her leave?
--:-- Noel King: She was very concerned about her deteriorating mental health.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she still struggles with anxiety. She still struggles with panic attacks.
--:-- Noel King: One of the things that Chloe told me was that, you know, in the aftermath of leaving the job, she had gone to watch the movie Mother, which includes a violent stabbing spree.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As she watched it, she started to think about that first video that she had seen in training, and she felt another panic attack coming on.
--:-- Noel King: And so she had to stand up and leave the theater.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's still kind of struggling to get on her feet.
--:-- Noel King: I think she's doing okay, but I think she would probably tell you that she would have been better off had she never taken this job.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Casey Newton from The Verge told us about Miguel and Facebook content moderators at the Cognizant facility in Phoenix in March of last year.
--:-- Noel King: His reporting on the trauma content moderators endure was a game changer for the tech industry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was picked up and shared all around the world.
--:-- Noel King: It led to this company, Cognizant leaving the content moderation business altogether last year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this week, we got the biggest news yet. Facebook decided to settle a class action lawsuit filed by current and former content moderators.
--:-- Noel King: Facebook is paying up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We called up Casey to explain how big a deal this all is.
--:-- Casey Newton: Yeah, so in the fall of 2018, just before I started my reporting on this issue, a moderator named Selena Scola, who had worked through a third-party vendor for Facebook in California, filed a lawsuit against a company in San Mateo Superior Court, alleging that Facebook had created an unsafe workspace for her.
--:-- Noel King: And over the next year and a half, she was joined by a handful of other moderators in Arizona, Texas, and Florida, alleging that they had had similar experiences.
--:-- Casey Newton: So is this a so-called class action lawsuit?
--:-- Noel King: That's right. And the idea is that their claims would eventually enable all 11,250 or so people who had done this work in North America for Facebook through a variety of third-party companies to join the case and get some sort of relief.
--:-- Casey Newton: So how does Facebook initially respond to this class action lawsuit? They denied the claims and said they were all baseless and pointed to the things that they do to try to take care of the moderators while they're on the job.
--:-- Noel King: Facebook executives have maintained that the working conditions described by dozens of contractors do not accurately reflect the daily lives of the majority of its workers.
--:-- Casey Newton: And when does that storyline shift? It sort of shifted this week when Facebook and the plaintiffs reached a preliminary settlement.
--:-- Noel King: And while Facebook continues to deny the allegations, they have agreed to pay out $52 million as a part of a settlement with this class of former workers.
--:-- Casey Newton: So do the math for us. How much money can former and current Facebook moderators hope to see?
--:-- Noel King: Everyone will get at least $1,000. The idea is that people will take that money and go get a mental health checkup.
--:-- Casey Newton: And for those people who either are newly diagnosed with a mental health condition or already have a mental health condition and can get a doctor's note, they'll be able to get two additional kinds of relief.
--:-- Noel King: One is they'll be eligible for between $1,500 and $6,000 of money to support their ongoing mental health care.
--:-- Casey Newton: And then two is they'll be eligible for up to $50,000 in damages depending on the severity of the injuries they suffered.
--:-- Noel King: The big asterisk on all of that is that people will be eligible for less money the more people apply. So once the money's gone, it's gone.
--:-- Casey Newton: And how many people actually get just depends on how many people ask for it.
--:-- Noel King: So this isn't meant to be a life-changing amount of money. Like you experienced this life trauma. Here's a bunch of money to take care of you.
--:-- Casey Newton: Yeah, but it's also symbolic, right? Because up until now, Facebook has denied that people are working in an unsafe environment.
--:-- Noel King: Some of the reports, I think, are a little overdramatic from digging into them and understanding what's going on.
--:-- Casey Newton: It's not that most people are just kind of looking at just terrible things all day long.
--:-- Noel King: And now the company has been forced to acknowledge that, in fact, a significant percentage of workers may actually be experiencing mental health issues as a direct result of doing the job.
--:-- Casey Newton: And now they're going to be paid out for it.
--:-- Noel King: And one of the things that that does is it sends a big message to anyone else who might do this job that, hey, this is a risky line of work, which I think is something that workers have a right to know.
--:-- Casey Newton: And it also puts pressure on all the other companies who are employing moderators to try to improve those working conditions as best they can, because otherwise they're going to be paying out these kinds of settlements too.
--:-- Noel King: And by other companies, you're talking about YouTube or its parent Google or Twitter, all these other platforms where we have content moderation going on?
--:-- Casey Newton: That's right. Content moderation is a feature of pretty much any website that allows anyone to upload images or text.
--:-- Noel King: And so while Facebook might employ more moderators than anyone else, there are a number of companies who are employing thousands of folks to do this work around the world.
--:-- Casey Newton: And so this really does feel like a landmark settlement that is going to have a lot of implications for this industry going forward.
--:-- Noel King: Does that make Facebook something of like a trailblazer here? To be the first to pay out and say we realize that this sucks?
--:-- Casey Newton: Yeah, sort of. But they were also the first to be sued right? So they sort of were dragged into this kicking and screaming.
--:-- Noel King: Yeah. Does this open up Facebook and Google or Twitter or anyone else to further lawsuits like this, further class action lawsuits that maybe could even have greater payouts for moderators?
--:-- Casey Newton: Yes. So there is a very similar lawsuit that is unfolding in Europe right now against Facebook.
--:-- Noel King: It was filed in Dublin by a former moderator there named Chris Gray.
--:-- Casey Newton: I'm just really angry. I mean, it's a very demanding job. And we always felt like we didn't get any respect, that we weren't important.
--:-- Noel King: And now there's more and more people complaining that they've been hurt, they've been damaged by the work, including myself.
--:-- Casey Newton: And the only way to get this solved is to force Facebook to accept responsibility.
--:-- Noel King: I've already heard from those plaintiffs today, and they tell me that they are going to be looking for a much larger number.
--:-- Casey Newton: But you can certainly imagine that Facebook is going to make a similar deal with those moderators.
--:-- Noel King: And then I think the big question is, what happens with Google and YouTube? What happens with Twitter?
--:-- Casey Newton: And, you know, what happens with some of these platforms that maybe we're not thinking about yet, like a Pinterest or a smaller social network?
--:-- Noel King: Again, I just think that we're going to start seeing a lot more of this.
--:-- Casey Newton: Has anything actually changed for the people who work in these positions?
--:-- Noel King: Yeah. Since I started my reporting on this, Facebook has rolled out a number of changes to the job itself.
--:-- Casey Newton: A lot of them have to do with what they call the tooling, which is basically the software that moderators use to find new posts and determine whether they should stay up or come down.
--:-- Noel King: By the end of 2020, Facebook has agreed that 80% of moderators will have access to tools that, for example, turn all content to black and white by default, or mute the audio on videos by default, or blur faces in graphic imagery, all of which have been shown to reduce the psychic impact of doing this work over a long period of time.
--:-- Casey Newton: And then the other set of changes that Facebook agreed to is to provide extra counseling, particularly for people who are seeing graphic content on a daily basis.
--:-- Noel King: They'll be able to go see a counselor if they're having an emergency within one business day.
--:-- Casey Newton: They'll also get access to weekly one-on-one coaching with a counselor.
--:-- Noel King: So they're hoping that they can manage this with a combination of better software and more psychologists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder, have you spoken to those people that you sort of shed a light on in your original reporting, people like Miguel, people like Chloe, since your original reporting or even since this settlement?
--:-- Casey Newton: Yeah, I heard from both of them yesterday.
--:-- Noel King: Both of them were really excited about what had happened.
--:-- Casey Newton: And I also called up a guy named Sean Spiegel, who I interviewed for my story about the moderators in Tampa last June.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sean is just one of the moderators whose story has never really left my mind. He was an animal lover who had to watch constant videos of animal abuse and wound up getting diagnosed with PTSD.
--:-- Noel King: He's a schoolteacher now. He's doing better. He's received treatment from licensed mental health care professionals.
--:-- Casey Newton: Who have worked with him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he had no involvement in the lawsuit whatsoever, but I called him up to tell him what was in the settlement.
--:-- Casey Newton: And he just stopped me and he said, hey, I just want to say, I don't care if I get any money out of this.
--:-- Noel King: When I went to work at Facebook, they told me I was going to be making the world a better place when I was doing this work.
--:-- Casey Newton: And I felt like I wasn't. And that's what I wanted to tell you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What Sean really struggled with was that he would see something terrible, and he would remove it from Facebook, and then the next day he would see it again, and the next day he would see it again.
--:-- Noel King: And so it was this Sisyphean task where no matter how many times he removed a terrible thing from the internet, it came back.
--:-- Casey Newton: And he felt like Facebook wasn't doing enough to prevent those terrible images from being re-uploaded and re-shared.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so over time, the entire enterprise just came to feel futile to him.
--:-- Noel King: I just never cease to be amazed by the decency and the civic-mindedness of the folks who do this work.
--:-- Casey Newton: So many of them really do want to make a better internet for you and me. They want to make the world a better place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And all they were asking for was working conditions that felt safe and took care of their mental health.
--:-- Noel King: And so we're still a long way away from that. But the hope is that this settlement is going to be a meaningful step forward.
--:-- Casey Newton: Casey Newton reports on Facebook and Democracy for the Verge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find all of his reporting on content moderators, including the original piece we featured, the trauma floor at TheVerge.com.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained. Bye-bye.
