- Part of the job description was,

"You will be part of a team

"that protects free speech online,"

which makes it seem very heroic.

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

and they've told me about their low pay,

their dire working conditions and in some cases,

the long term mental health consequences

of doing the work that they do.

A content moderator is kind of like

a police officer for the internet.

If you ever see something that you think

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

to the ones I had heard about already.

What I did learn surprised me.

(dramatic music)

- Part of doing our job and how they would make

us feel better about it was that,

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

(dramatic music)

- Over the course of my reporting,

I talked to both people who worked at Google full time

and people who had been hired

on through third-party contractors.

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

from the consequences of doing the job.

- I was a legal root removals associate,

which is a very fancy way of saying I was

a content moderator at Google.

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

You show up, you have your orientation,

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

What is your job?

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

So you're assigned to a queue based on either

an issue area or a geographic area.

I focused on the French market,

because my first languages were French and English

and I also worked on our child sexual abuse imagery cases

and our terrorism 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

sent over to contractors.

They would then escalate to us if it was kind

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

we would then escalate to our council.

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?

- Very early on.

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

to two hours per week, when in reality,

we were understaffed, so we would be in there

sometimes five, six hours a week,

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

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

- Yeah, yeah.

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

a group of kids, toddlers,

that were hanging on to one of those ropes

so that they don't go far.

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,

children being raped, at that age.

This is three, three years old.

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

and my friend had to make sure I was okay

and I had to sit down for a second

and I just exploded crying.

She was like, "What just happened?"

And I couldn't explain it to her and I just,

these racing thoughts and then, an instant panic attack.

I was having nightmares, I wasn't sleeping,

I had spent multiple days just crying in the bathroom.

I was having all of these panic attacks.

My work productivity just dipped.

Finally, my manager was like,

"Listen, we really need you

"to step up your productivity game."

I just snapped and I turned to him and I said,

"Do you understand what we're looking at

"and we're not machines, we're humans.

"So we have emotions and those emotions

"are deeply scarred by looking at children

"being raped all the time and people getting

"their heads chopped off."

It was like there was no escape and yeah,

I finally snapped and they took that as,

oh, she needs to take a second, she needs to breathe.

And I was said, "No, I need to leave."

The free food, the nap pods, all these benefits,

this doesn't mean anything if this is,

if this is my day-to-day.

- Daisy helped me understand how hard this job is to

do even when you work in the greatest office in the world.

But the truth is that most people don't work

in an office half that nice.

One of Google's biggest projects that it has

to moderate, of course, is YouTube.

When it comes to YouTube,

Google has decided to give most of the work

of content moderation to third-party contractors.

Recently, I went to Austin, Texas, to meet with a group

of moderators who work for Accenture on the YouTube project.

Specifically, they work on what is called the VE queue.

VE standing for violent extremism.

120 times a day,

they review YouTube videos that have terrorism,

graphic violence and other disturbing content.

You're about to hear from one of them

and we've altered the audio to protect their identity.

- [Moderator] So, at the beginning,

they told you to watch some videos.

You're going to take some actions.

You will apply the YouTube polices.

But you don't feel how this is going to impact you.

- In some ways, the content moderators who do this work

for Google and YouTube are treated better

than the ones who work for Facebook.

Most prominently, they get two hours of break time each day.

Basically, two hours of paid leave in which they

can recover from the challenges of doing this work.

But, most of them aren't able

to take a full two hours a day.

- [Moderator] They're forcing you, micromanaging you

to have to be sitting on the desk five hours and a half.

And if you don't, there is going to be a punishments.

The schedules will be changed.

You will be on night shift.

And this is going to affect my wellness time.

I will never take my three hours.

(dramatic music)

- [Casey] What kind of things do they

do that make life hard?

- [Moderator] They always have complaints about everyone.

You know, like, I have something on you.

If you make any problems, you know what?

This is the reason that I can fire you.

- [Casey] Right, right.

- [Moderator] One of the things that they always saying

is if we miss one agent tomorrow, we get another 10.

- [Casey] So they're constantly reminding you

how easily you can be replaced?

- [Moderator] Yes.

The problem that's they feel stuck somewhere.

They can't leave the work

because they have responsibilities.

He have bills right now he have to pay.

- [Casey] So it sounds like people feel kind of trapped.

- [Moderator] They are.

Yeah, that's a good word.

- When I brought all this to Google,

the company told me that it takes the health

of its workers very seriously and pointed out

that it offers onsite counseling to both

its full-time employees and to its contractors.

I think it's worth pointing out, though,

that even though Daisy had access to that onsite counseling,

the counselor she had ultimately told her

to go seek outside help and get a therapist.

Daisy also eventually took medical leave

and ultimately got an emotional support animal to help her.

It's a dog named Stella.

- Hi five.

Found a psychiatrist and I found a therapist.

The psychiatrist put me on antidepressants.

I was diagnosed with chronic anxiety and PTSD.

And then, I started seeing a therapist just to talk

through these things and she said,

"Is legal removals associate anything close

"to a content moderator?"

And I said, "It is a content moderator."

And she said, "Trust me when I say you are not

"the first person that I've seen

"with this particular issue."

- It seems like recovering from doing this job

has itself been a full time job.

- Oh, yeah.

Whenever someone talks to me about content moderation,

I say, "I'm a recovering content moderator."

They're like, "Oh, you talk about it like it's,

"it's like alcoholism."

And I said, "Well, you never fully recover."

- One of the things that is so interesting to me

about your story is that you are one of the very few people

I've talked to who did content moderation as

a full time employee of a company, rather than a contractor.

You had access to six months of paid medical leave.

A contractor who's moderating for YouTube in Austin

doesn't have that same access.

- I had those months to think about my choices

and to think about ways out without having

to deal with unemployment or having to deal with

how am I gonna pay rent.

I know those contractors don't have that opportunity.

- The contractors I've talked with in Austin

,are making $18.50 an hour, about $37,000 a year.

Does that seem like a high enough wage given some

of the risks involved?

- Absolutely not.

There's never gonna be enough money to make this okay.

I'm gonna be clear about that.

But, I think that you need to pay contractors proportional

to what they're going through, the impact of their work,

because this is so vital to the business.

- Let's put a fine point on it.

If Google can't exist without the work that you did, right,

like you were responding to official legal requests

from governments-- - Yup.

- That would have otherwise shut Google down

in their country-- - Yup.

- If you didn't respond.

- Exactly.

- So this is very high stakes work.

And yet, for some reason,

these companies have just chosen not to value it.