I read a shocking article in The Week about Social Media Moderators. The role of a Social Media Moderator is to look through the billions of posts, videos and comments uploaded to the internet every week and then identify and possibly delete content which is racist, homophobic, bullying, pornographic or shows graphic violence.
Rachel was being interviewed and said she had ‘spent 8 years sifting through a torrent of hate’ and has seen things she can’t unsee. What’s alarming to note is that it’s a boom industry, in the last 18 months Facebook has increased its number of moderators from 4,500 to 15,000.
It’s the stuff of nightmares, to know there are people employed to work their way through the 400 videos uploaded to YouTube every minute or the 21 million Tweets a minute, to just give an example of the volume of content being shared online. You may have come across distressing content and that’s either because it hasn’t been removed yet, or, it’s been assessed by moderators as not bad ‘enough.’
Rachel left the industry, explaining that ‘it’s the normalising of nastiness that saps your faith in people and affects your world view.'
For Your Internal Internet
Notice the content you read and consume (I’m not talking about the really dark things) notice your thoughts, what you spend your time listening to, the people you surround yourself with, and be your own moderator.
For the World Wide Internet.
As a good person reading this article, you’ve got to use your online presence to thank these people, the majority of whom are women, working in this poorly paid industry.
But more than that, we’ve got to upload a torrent of beautiful content; images, videos and comments of support and connection. Tip the scales in favour of humanity.
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Photo by Jonathan Jones.
Thank you, Rosie Pose x