The Verge published another expose yesterday detailing the horrific working conditions of Facebook’s content moderators. In many ways these moderators represent the modern coal miners of the digital age, working under horrific conditions threatening their safety, health and mental and emotional well-being, all but invisible to society, in some cases sacrificing their very lives to ensure a prosperous and profitable existence for their employer and a happier and more successful world for the rest of society. Given the horrors they confront on Facebook each day, is it time to simply say no more to the platform?
Facebook’s content moderators are immersed each day in the absolute worst of society’s most horrific actions. They destroy their health and can be left with permanent mental and emotional scars and PTSD from spending each and every day saturated with indescribable horror.
Asked about the working conditions described in The Verge article, the company noted that it pays its moderators more than its peers and issued a glib statement that “there will inevitably be employee challenges or dissatisfaction” and that “when the circumstances warrant action on the part of management, we make sure it happens.”
How would Facebook respond to the criticism that it sacrifices these “expendables” working invisibly behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements in order to help the rest of us live happier and healthier lives?
The company unsurprisingly did not respond.
After all, why should it?
The company is now so dominate and so powerful that it has nothing to fear from government regulators, policymakers, investors or the public.
Its stock has soared stratospherically over the past year that has been defined by almost endless privacy and security scandals.
Much has been written in the press and academic literature documenting the almost inhuman working conditions of Facebook’s content moderators, but beyond a bit of embarrassing press, the company faces no actual pressure to change. Its profitability is soaring, its user base is growing steadily and its users continue to pour content into its coffers, seemingly utterly unworried about their privacy, security or digital safety.
Even the European Union’s previous drumbeat of antitrust warnings has faded, with its antitrust chief recently adopting a far more conciliatory tone and the EU lauding the company as a tremendously positive and important force on the continent. In the US, years of privacy and security violations are likely to yield a token slap on the wrist so minor the company could write down its entire value without so much as a rounding error. While US antitrust clouds loom, it is almost a foregone conclusion that the company’s near-total control over the digital discourse means it will rapidly shift the narrative away from any real threat to its business.
Regulators have turned an indifferent eye to the plight of the company’s army of modern coal miners. The vast majority of its moderators are contractors, working for third-party companies that Facebook can simply swap out at a moment’s notice, distancing itself from their inhumane conditions. Those contractors are increasingly spread across the world, placing them beyond the reach of any single regulatory body, meaning each individual country would have to step forward to protect the workers on its soil.
Even if the US were to step forward with new regulations governing the use of contract content moderators, it is likely that the company would merely shift its work overseas. Today’s globalized companies are increasingly beyond the reach of any single country’s regulators.
Putting this all together, Facebook’s content moderators are the modern-day coal miners, invisible to its ordinary users, toiling away in horror behind closed doors to power their happy lives.
The company’s soaring profitability and growing, happy and oblivious user base mean it has absolutely no incentive to improve their working conditions.
The lack of appetite from regulators to intervene and the public’s utter indifference to what they see as a necessary evil to make their own lives happier and healthier means Facebook faces little pressure to change.
In the end, our modern-day coal miners are unfortunately doomed to work themselves into early deaths until the coming AI revolution can replace them, yet another casualty of the dark machinery that lurks beneath and powers the happy sunny Web we all take for granted.
