Name: Google and YouTube moderators speak out
Uploaded: 2020-11-17T18:46:06.000Z
Duration: 12 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It felt like you were putting on a cape working at Google.

- Over the past year, I've been reporting on the lives

of Facebook's content moderators in America

their dire working conditions and in some cases,

doesn't belong on a site and you report it,

that report is gonna be reviewed by a human being.

While a lot of what they see is really benign,

like spam, for example, some of it's really disturbing.

I'm talking about murder, terrorism and child exploitation.

Recently, I started seeing out people who did

this kind of work for Google and YouTube.

I wanted to see how their experiences compared

- Part of doing our job and how they would make

"You guys see this so other people don't have to see this."

I talked to both people who worked at Google full time

It became clear to me that no matter who hired you,

doing this job over a long enough time period

can cause significant mental health consequences.

But it also became clear to me that there is

a big difference in how Google employees get treated

and how those third-party contractors get treated.

Today, a former full-time Google employee

named Daisy Soderberg-Rivken is going on the record

to talk about her experiences as a content moderator.

She had access to all the perks and all the benefits

that come with being a full-time Google employee.

But at the end of that day, that didn't save her

which is a very fancy way of saying I was

- Let's talk about what the job actually was.

you sit down at your computer, it's time to do your job.

- You usually start your work by going through a queue.

So you're assigned to a queue based on either

because my first languages were French and English

and I also worked on our child sexual abuse imagery cases

- And you were working primarily on web search, right?

- Yes, we as in-house content moderators,

we would usually handle more high level, complex issues.

Certain things that were very high volumes,

such as defamation and copyright were typically

They would then escalate to us if it was kind

of a gray area, but if it was even a gray area for us,

It was kind of levels of how specialized we were.

- At what point did you start to feel like you

were seeing more disturbing stuff than you expected?

They said we would be analyzing child sexual abuse imagery

but I remember clearly, in parentheses, it said,

this kind of content would be limited to one

we were understaffed, so we would be in there

which sounds like nothing, but it's actually...

- Oh, it sounds like a lot. - It's a lot.

When do you first notice that doing this job

was starting to affect your mental health?

- When I was walking around San Francisco, actually,

and I was with one of my friends and we saw

that were hanging on to one of those ropes

I looked at them and then, I kind of blinked once,

and suddenly, I just had a flash of images

of some of the images I had seen, children being tied up,

I kind of like stopped and I was kind of blinking a lot

and my friend had to make sure I was okay

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Google and YouTube moderators speak out

ultimately

mental

content

access