A young girl stands in the middle of a modern work room with many large computer screens and people who spend all day dealing with social media and the internet. Grim, expressionless faces that hide an inner battle. A battle that for most people is lost.
The girl presses play on the computer and on the large central screen of the room begins to play an amateur video.
In the horrific images that follow, a man is stabbed dozens of times and, screaming for his life, eventually dies in a pool of blood. The girl had to calmly explain to the others if this video violates his posting rules Facebook and why it should be deleted. He did it. And then it collapsed in the office hallway.
These few seconds for many are capable of stigmatizing a life forever. For others it's just a Monday at work. To be precise, it is a Monday at work for about 15.000 employees worldwide.
Every day we see in our timeline passing dozens of videos that vary in content. Depending on how active we are and who we follow, quantity and quality vary.
Funny videos with animals, babies, phases from stands and stadiums, strange snapshots of our everyday life, even quite… pink videos appear in the post stream in Facebook or are in our messenger.
Behind the screens of our mobile phones, however, there is a condition that could only be compared to torture.
Thousands of employees in the US and in countries (mainly) in Southeast Asia filter every day what we try to upload on Facebook: Hate speech, pedophilia, sexual abuse every kind, murders, suicides are just some of the daily problems faced by contractors who work with the media giant.
To someone who does not know, it may seem like a lifelong dream to work for Facebook. For these thousands of consumables around the world, the reality is far from over.
According to a detailed report by The Verge, the content moderators of the popular social networking platform are paid by a external partner $ 15 an hour and work in conditions more reminiscent of a call center, despite the first line of a colossus worth $ 500 billion.
To fully understand the size of the amount of information that employees have to deal with, they have about 30 seconds to check each post!
Thousands of prospective posts and thousands of pages of material pass through their eyes. Any mistake can be fatal for many of the parties involved. They leave their personal mobile phone at home as for security reasons they are not allowed to have it with them, as well as papers or chewing gum in their pockets.
The companies that hire on behalf of Facebook operate with "galley" logics. Breaks are a relative term used when trying it. As members of these companies reported on condition of anonymity, they were often forced to wait in huge queues in front of the few toilets to use them.
Again according to the vice president of its global operations department FacebookAccording to Justin Osowski, the above allegations are unfounded: "These collaborations are important because they allow us to work with established companies that have valuable experience in this type of work and can offer very fast language support. They can comfortably manage a large workforce and report any problems or risks efficiently. They also have the ability to adapt to our guidelines and to coordinate with the needs of our community and our products, which change over time. " In addition, Facebook said that contracts with their external partners "explicitly provide good facilities, employee wellness breaks and psychological support."
When the conversation goes to the earnings part the discussion becomes even darker. The people who agreed to speak in the report did so even though the contracts they had signed had quite strict clauses for not providing information about their work environment.
This is also evident from the fact that the contract staff of Phoenix, the company that hires employees for Facebook, earns $ 28.800 a year, while employees who have a contract with Facebook itself make $ 240.000 a year.
As the moderators themselves describe, the image of their workplace can only be described as chaos. In order to cope, the employees tell each other black and inhuman jokes. They are discussing the possibility suicide as if it were a normal condition.
Then they go out for a short "break" on the stairs outside the building to smoke marijuana and numb their thoughts and feelings. Contractors' offices are a place where everything is done under a constant fear. Either the fear of being fired after a mistake or the fear that a former colleague will return to ask for change by reaping everything.
It is the place where those in charge control the time they urinate or pray. It is also the place where people in order to be able to get rid of a bit of extreme stress engage in sexual acts on the stairs or in breastfeeding rooms.
Within this framework, many of the moderators display various types of psychological disorders, most notably that of post-traumatic stress (PTSD). Not a few are so affected that they begin to believe many of the things they see on their screens every day. Unbelievable conspiracy theories become plausible while they may "sleep with a gun to their head at night"
"If you are not allowed to talk to your friends or family about your job, it creates some distance. You feel closer to your partners. It may seem like an emotional bond, but in reality it is just a traumatic experience that unites you ", explains one of them, saying that without them" the Facebook that would be a very bad thing. " And he may not be wrong.