![]() She earned a good salary, nearing the six-figure mark. ![]() Then I met a woman who had worked as a content moderator for Google itself. Bring the moderators in house, pay them as you would pay a police officer or firefighter, and perhaps you could reduce the mental health toll of constant exposure to graphic violence. “We see the people coming from there, how they are, how they are acting more free,” Peter tells me.įor most of this year, I thought the same thing Peter did. A higher wage, better health benefits, and more caring managers would alleviate the burdens of the job, they told me. More than that, though, Peter and other moderators in Austin told me they wanted to live like the full-time Google employees who sometimes visit his office. (For this reason, I agreed to use pseudonyms for most of the workers in this story.) They worry about speaking out - to a manager, to a journalist - for fear it will complicate their immigration efforts. Several workers I spoke with are hoping to become citizens, a feat that has only grown more difficult under the Trump administration. The company depends on his language skills - he speaks seven - to accurately identify hate speech and terrorist propaganda and remove it from YouTube. Accenture recruited dozens of Arabic speakers like him, many of whom grew up in the Middle East. Like many of his co-workers working in the VE queue in Austin, Peter is an immigrant. You’re feeling there is nothing worth living for. “After that, you feel like wow, this world is really crazy. “Every day you watch someone beheading someone, or someone shooting his girlfriend,” Peter tells me. When he drives by the building where he works, even on his off days, a vein begins to throb in his chest. Since he began working in the violent extremism queue, Peter noted, he has lost hair and gained weight. But he worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does: $18.50 an hour, or about $37,000 a year. His family has repeatedly urged him to quit. Peter, who has done this job for nearly two years, worries about the toll that the job is taking on his mental health. Another co-worker, wracked with anxiety and depression caused by the job, neglected his diet so badly that he had to be hospitalized for an acute vitamin deficiency. In the past year, Peter has seen one of his co-workers collapse at work in distress, so burdened by the videos he had seen that he took two months of unpaid leave from work. And like all content moderation jobs that involve daily exposure to violence and abuse, it has had serious and long-lasting consequences for the people doing the work. It is some of the grimmest work to be done at Alphabet. Peter works what is known internally as the “VE queue,” which stands for violent extremism.
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