Casey Newton on the secret life of Facebook moderators

In “The Trauma Floor,” The Verge’s Casey Newton uncovered the horrendous working conditions for contract Facebook moderators. On this week’s Vergecast, he and editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discuss how he uncovered them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Nathan from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we've got one of our own. We have Casey Newton, The Verge's Silicon Valley editor. He has been working on a huge feature about what it's like to moderate content for Facebook. He's been working on it for weeks, months. As you know, Casey writes the interface, a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy. And some moderators who are tasked with removing the bad content from Facebook reached out to him. And he went and met them. They work for a contractor called Cognizant in Arizona. He talked to them about what it's like to live that life, to deal with that trauma, to see that bad stuff every day. And then, Facebook actually invited him in to look at the facility. So he saw it, met with some other moderators, some managers there. And he really unpacked just how much hidden work is done

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  to keep a huge platform like Facebook relatively clean. And it's not perfect, but it's super interesting. These are real people who are making just $15 an hour, tasked with looking at some of the worst stuff posted to Facebook and deciding whether it stays up or goes down. So, check this out. Here's Casey.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have Casey Newton here. Casey is our Silicon Valley editor. He is also the writer, the author, the host of The Interface, which is a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy. Welcome, Casey.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Hey, it's great to be here, Neelai.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  You just published a blockbuster story on theverge.com today about the lives of the people who moderate Facebook. And there's 15,000 of these folks around the world, but there are more and more of them in the United States, and you found some of them.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  That's right. In December of last year, I got a tip from a newsletter reader that the working conditions at one of these sites where Facebook moderates content were really bad, and they wanted to talk about it. And so we got on the phone. And so for the next three months, I talked to everyone I could who ever worked at this site. And I've actually heard from a few more of them today, which has been really interesting. But for the purposes of the story, there were about a dozen people who contributed something. And collectively, they painted a portrait of a workplace that was often on the brink of chaos.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  I want to start there. It doesn't seem like there's another state for this to be in. And I want to unpack that a little bit. What is the actual job that they're doing?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  What they do is they use a piece of software called Single Review Tool, or SRT, and it offers up an endless queue of posts that someone somewhere in the world has reported for violating Facebook's content policy. So some of this stuff is benign. Some of this is just people trolling their friends by reporting their posts. But of course, a lot of it is really disturbing. It's violent content. It's graphic sexual content. It's child exploitation. It's stuff that, if you look at it long enough, can have really lasting and negative effects on your mental health. And so, you know, you sort of asked, like, what is the job? The job is to work an eight-hour shift where you're going to be asked to look

• 4:10Speaker 03

  at maybe 300, maybe 400, if you're really moving quickly, posts per day, and then spending less than 30 seconds on each item, decide whether it adheres to Facebook's very lengthy community guidelines. And as the story points out, those guidelines are actually changing almost every day.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  So the job is? You fire up this tool called Single Review Tool. It just shows you something on Facebook that somebody reported. And you click yes or no, based on what you know of Facebook's guidelines.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  That's right. And if you say this is violating, then you have to say why it's violating. And you sort of also have to say like, in what order it's violating. So like this very weird quirk of the system that I didn't describe in the story is if like, if something depicts violence, but there's also nudity in the image, which actually like happens a lot, and you you mark the post as violating for being violent, that will count against your accuracy score because what you should have marked it for was having nudity, which is like the highest order of violation in Facebook's rules.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  At one point in the story, you described this as a video game. And I think what you just described is the worst video game of all time.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  It honestly really boggled my mind, too, because I think we could agree that the important thing to everyone is that we get this stuff off of Facebook and Instagram. Nobody wants to, well, I shouldn't say nobody, but almost nobody wants to look at this stuff. And so the idea that you would discipline and even fire moderators because they marked the wrong reason for why they deleted a post that included violence and nudity, like it does kind of strain my credulity.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  So these moderators go to work. They use the SRT tool. They're clicking away. They're trying to get it right. How does Facebook measure whether they're right or not? How does Facebook maintain quality in this system?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  So there's this great quote from a person I talked to in the story who says, accuracy is only measured by agreement. So here's how it works. Let's say someone is obviously selling heroin to someone else. For whatever reason, I miss it. And so I mark that as it's benign. We'll leave it up on the site. That goes into my big bucket of all of the decisions I made during the week. Well, at the end of the week, someone known as a QA, a quality assurance worker, Is going to receive a random subset of all of the decisions that I've made over the past week, let's say 50 or 60 of my decisions. And then the auditor, the QA, is going to go through that list and see whether they agree with all of my decisions.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  If the auditor agrees with me, then I performed an accurate action. And if the moderator disagrees, then it was inaccurate. Now, of course, Facebook itself is then going to audit a subset of the QA's decisions. And so it's from those interactions that this accuracy number is judged. But, you know, as you can imagine, there have been cases where a reviewer will be marked as incorrect for an action that they took. And then they'll go to the moderator and say, oh, come on, man, like, you got to help me out here. And then it'll just kind of get changed back. And if it never gets audited, then congratulations, you made an accurate decision.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  That sounds horrifying. I'm just going to be honest with you. The idea that, A, there are these rules that are sort of opaque to the users of Facebook, to us, who pay a lot of attention to Facebook, to Congress, which seems to be aggressively interested in getting Facebook wrong. So there's this, like, set of rules that nobody understands. And then how we interpret the rules, how Facebook interprets the rules, is really caught up in layers of agreement. It seems like that's a system that can never be optimized fully.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  It's hard to know how else you do it when you're dealing with questions that have so many shades of gray, right? Every year, the guidelines get longer, and it's because every year, we have more and more experience with moderating human speech, right? So this document that these moderators rely on, it's just going to grow and grow and grow. And the idea that you could get it to a place where there would be unanimous agreement about whether to take down something or not, it just doesn't really hold any water. Like, someone is going to have to be making these calls.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  But at the same time, I think by calling it accuracy and by firing moderators for making just a handful of mistakes a week against this policy, you've created this incredibly high-pressure job where people who are making $15 an hour and who've been entrusted with these very important questions of speech and security

• 8:45Speaker 03

  They're now being held to the standard that many of them described to me as impossible. So like that that nature of the work where you you must be accurate and yet accuracy is also just kind of what what folks on the ground agree with, I think, is really problematic.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  By the way, at $15 an hour as a full-time job, it adds up to what, 28,800?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, 28,800 a year. And, you know, if you stay on for a year, you can get a 47 cents an hour increase. But these are these are low-paying jobs. Now, what Facebook would say is, well, we pay 20% more than the minimum wage in every market that we're in. And Cognizant, which is the contractor that ran the site that I that I write about here, has said to me that they've had very good luck in recruiting. So, you know, from their perspective, this has been a success. But one of the things I tried to explore in the story is kind of the absurdity of taking a job that is so important and paying it basically as little as you can get away with. Like, $15 an hour isn't the minimum wage in Arizona, but it is the minimum wage in an increasing number of locales around the country.

• 9:49Nilay Patel?

  I mean, just the fact of it is, that's how much they value the job.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  $15 an hour. And it, this is the thing that they get caught the most against, right, is what are these decisions? What are you censoring? What gets us up? What gets us to come down? And if they're kind of openly saying, this is how much we value the people making these individual decisions. It it seems like that disconnect is a lot bigger than Facebook wants to admit.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Here's what I think is going on. When you look at what Facebook has said about content moderation over the past couple of years, they're always very quick to point out the amount of moderation that they're able to do via machine learning, AI, and how that number is growing over time. So in the context of ISIS, for example, they're typically able to identify ISIS content now really quickly and maybe prevent it from ever even being uploaded. And that's a good thing. I think the problem, though, is that when you start talking about it in those terms, you have already decided that the job that you're doing is essentially a machine job and that these 15,000 workers that you've hired around the world to do this are effectively a stopgap measure. And they're going to be

• 11:00Speaker 03

  given this task for only as long as until the machine can do it. And of course, as a result, you're not going to see the people who are doing this job fully as people, right? You're going to see them as as cogs in a machine. And and so a lot of what I wanted to kind of explore in this story was just the humanity of these people and like, what is their lived experience of of doing a job and try to separate that just from the system that has been built up around them?

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  There's a very famous poster that's hung up at Facebook headquarters that a lot of people have been tweeting in response to your story today, which is, there's literally a poster at Facebook headquarters that says contractors are people too. And I think that that's the thing that makes the point that you are saying is, Facebook is reminding itself that its contractors are also human beings.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  There is something so dark about that to me because, obviously, like, the person who created that poster did so with good intentions. And and I bet that whoever made that poster probably has thought more about the humanity of these contractors than than maybe some other people at the company. But certainly, the idea that you need a reminder, it is a great concern. Like, there was a great story in the Wall Street Journal a week or two ago about how many big companies now rely on outsourced labor and how it's just a seemingly never ending, growing part of the the US economy, right? So like, a lot of companies rely on that labor. But I think we have to start asking ourselves

• 12:27Speaker 03

  about the kinds of jobs that we are asking this outsourced labor to do. And then what are the unintended consequences of having it be contracted? And like, this story is essentially just like a litany of like, some of the bad things that can happen when you let these things get out of your direct site.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  So just real quick, you went to this facility, you went down there, you met a bunch of people, we came back, and then you did the the responsible thing, you said to Facebook, I'm doing this story, I need a comment. And then Facebook invited you in the facility.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Last week, several days before we were going to publish the story, I sort of reached out to Facebook. I said, you know, here's what I've been doing, here's who I've talked to, here's what they've said. And they surprised me by inviting me to the site. And the reason it was a surprise was, as far as I know, this is the first time that Facebook has invited a reporter to one of its American content moderation sites since it started expanding the program around the world in 2017. And, you know, as you may remember, the reason that they started expanding in 2017 was after the US election, there was a lot of, you know, worrying that Facebook wasn't doing an effective job at moderating content. And so they started like hiring, you know, all of these extra people.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  But we hadn't really seen one of the inside of these facilities in America or talked to the American contractors. And so, you know, I had the opportunity to do that and I'm really glad I went and I do think it added a bunch to the story.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  So, one of my favorite things is Facebook loves to say, "These are not dark and dingy places." We have some photos, they actually let us take a photographer with you. It is in fact a Breitner office. But that's where the similarity to like a regular Facebook office runs out, right? What is it like to go to work at this place? What happens there?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  So, to me, the biggest difference is just the degree to which your time is managed at this site. It is managed down to the second. You get two 15-minute breaks, you get a 30-minute lunch, and then you get nine minutes per day of something called wellness time, which many people have said on Twitter today reminds them of a George Saunders short story. But every time you leave your desk, you have to click a Chrome extension that says "why", effectively. And when I asked Facebook about why that is, I was told, "Well, that's just sort of how things are done in this industry." But this winds up having a lot of negative consequences for the workers. I mean, beyond just sort of the lack of freedom, you know, something that happens to workers during the day is they want to use the bathroom, right?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  So, they have these limited breaks and the space for a long time had just a single bathroom with only a few stalls for the men and the women, and so there would be lines to use the restroom. And because of this, you know, once they were done using the restroom, they might only have a couple of minutes to go to their locker where they have to store their phone because, you know, for good reason, Facebook doesn't want them to be Attempted to take pictures of of private information. But, you know, in effect, after they use the bathroom, they're they have like six minutes of break a day or something like that. And so people started using their wellness time to go to the bathroom. But then Facebook found out that that was happening and all of the employees were ordered not to use their wellness time to go to the bathroom. I should also say, I interviewed three of these people for about a four hour stretch

• 15:34Speaker 03

  in each case, and not one of them used the bathroom. And when I sort of pointed that out, they said, oh, yeah, like, we've been trained.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  And I was, you know, yeah, I know. It was it was a dark moment.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  So they go in, they sit down, their time is managed a second, they start reviewing things, and then it seems like that just accumulates trauma because they're looking at a bunch of horrible stuff.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have heard from so many moderators who work for Facebook and other sites today, they've been blowing up my DMs and my emails. And what appears to be this universal phenomenon is you get so close to your coworkers in a hurry. I mean, this really is a foxhole that you're working in. And so people are just sending what they call jobs all around the floor. So a job is something that's been reported. And, you know, somebody will just see something incredibly offensive joke and they'll just send it to a friend. Essentially, whatever your ethnicity is at one of these sites, people will just send you offensive content about your ethnicity or about your religion as a way of like joking around and be like, man, you know, can you believe this? And, you know, no one who I talked to necessarily thought that was a bad thing, but I do think

• 16:39Speaker 03

  it speaks to just kind of the grimness of this environment. And then, of course, in addition to just like, kind of, you know, racist and offensive speech that gets traded around, there's a lot of dark talk about suicide, you know? And it's it's jokey talk about suicide, but in this kind of environment, it's, you know, really concerning.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with Casey Newton.

• 18:24Nilay Patel?

  There's a vignette in your story where they, a bunch of moderators, see somebody else on the roof of a building across the way.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  They just wait to see if that person will jump because they're just trained because they've seen so many suicide videos. That, it's that stuff that just really continually hit home with me as we were working on this piece.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that particular anecdote was so chilling for me because what we're asking these people to do is pattern match, right? Like, we want them to see content and then be like, oh, yeah, like, this is a bad thing. It's got to be removed from Facebook. But they never stop doing it. And so even when they just see a coworker on the roof, their mind just immediately goes to, this is going to be a suicide. And Like a lighter example of the same thing, somebody told me about watching Netflix. And as characters would say various things, in their mind, the moderator would just be like, "Well, we'd remove that because, you know, that's saying that, you know, Irish people are inferior." Or, you know, whatever. So, you know, moderators I spoke with talked about sort of not being able to turn off this kind of thinking once they left the office.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's so funny that we start out calling it a video game and what you're describing to me is dreaming about Tetris, but with the worst things imaginable.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  It's really hard. And, you know, I should say, you know, while I was at the Facebook site, I did talk to some moderators, you know, who had volunteered to speak with me. And Facebook knew they were going to speak with me, and their manager sat next to them while they spoke with me. You know, some people would say, "Well, you know, there's no way they're going to tell you the truth." But I don't think these people would have volunteered to speak, you know, if they weren't sincere. And I took all of them at their word. And one of them said, "Look, like, don't overstate the amount of this content that we see. You know, a lot of the stuff we see is really benign." You know, and the rest of them sort of said, "Look, like, we like this work because we believe we're making a difference," which they are, by the way, a huge difference. And they thought that they were sort of taken care of and supported.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  So there is another view of this, and I do want to say this, like, it is not the case that every single moderator has the experience of some of the people, the other people that I wrote about in the story. But do I think this phenomenon is much bigger than it has previously been talked about, and that it probably has other dimensions that we still haven't explored yet? Yeah, completely.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  The one dimension I think is absolutely worth exploring and studying is the notion that being exposed to conspiracy theories and misinformation will make you believe it, even if your job is to delete it.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  And you definitely, you spoke to some folks who they believe that 9/11 was an inside job, which is false, and who believe the world is flat, which is false. And this seems to just come up a little bit more often than anyone would reasonably hope.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, even for folks that I spoke with who had not felt affected in that way, they did tell me that they felt in danger of that, right? I talked to one person who said that after they watched their 15th Alex Jones video, they thought, "Oh, he's starting to make some sense." And then they caught the And they're like, oh, my God, I need to stop doing this. You know, after my story came out today, somebody tweeted at me that there has been apparently some research on this subject and that academic researchers who study misinformation have experienced similar effects. It is a phenomenon that is somewhat known, apparently, but when I asked Facebook Incognizant about it, it was news to them. Like, they said that they had not been previously aware of this phenomenon. One of the reasons I think it's important to think through the implications of that

• 21:42Speaker 03

  is that this might be a job that you have for six or eight months before you get fired. I heard a story that almost an entire training class, which, you know, involved dozens of people, almost an entire class was walked out the door on their final day of training because they weren't accurate enough. Other people I talked to started having panic attacks during training, right? So think about what kind of lasting effect on your psyche might come from doing this job for a year and then how long this job will have changed you forever. I think that the lasting impacts can be quite severe. And again, for $15 an hour, it just doesn't seem like a good bargain.

• 22:20Nilay Patel?

  Most of the people that you talk to, they seem to have lasted a year or two years. And then there's some people who are like, I like this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay and I see career opportunities.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and look, I mean, there are people who are doing similar kinds of jobs for the FBI, right? There are other folks out there who have to look at really grim content and who choose to do it at least for a time because they can make the world a better place by scrubbing it from the internet. I think what most of those folks have in common, though, is that they get paid a lot more money and that in many cases, they, they're doing a job that is so important that taxpayers pay for it, right? That like, that you and I pay money so that they do that. We recognize that as a societal level need, a society level need, I guess I should say. And when you look at the size of Facebook and Instagram, right, reaching more than

• 23:12Speaker 03

  2 billion people around the world every month, moderating that content is actually a society level need. And we haven't thought about it in that way yet, but this is yet another consequence of, of having a platform that has grown that large.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  Just before we came on, our producer Zach and I were talking about other kinds of jobs where we inflict this level of pain on people and trauma on people.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  The United States government routinely sends young people into war, but then they come back and we valorize them. We have police and firefighters. We valorize them as first responders. There does not appear to be that additional level of valor and value described by the people using the single review tool at a contractor in Phoenix.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  And there absolutely should be. And actually, for me, maybe the most exciting part of writing this story was the hope that I could shed light on the work that they do. Because again, as somebody who uses Facebook and Instagram, I benefit from their work every day, even though I will never know their names. There's an interesting dimension to this, which involves secrecy. So Facebook actually has very good reason for not wanting us to know the names of and valorize individual content moderators. One reason is their personal safety. If somebody knows that you are a Facebook content moderator, maybe they confront you in public because one of your posts got taken down and you want to have a conversation about it, right? Or maybe you want to have a violent confrontation about it.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  So Facebook takes pains to protect the identities of these people and prevent the public from knowing who they are for that very good reason, which I support. There's another good reason, which is if you didn't have these moderators sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement, they might feel like they could share Facebook users' personal information and say, oh yeah, like I saw this crazy thing today, right? That could have really negative privacy consequences. So for those reasons, there's a lot of secrecy around what these folks are doing. But one of the things that I wanted to point out was just how awful the consequences of that secrecy can be, right? Because not only do these people not get the credit that they deserve for the work

• 25:15Speaker 03

  that they do, but many of the ones that I spoke to actually felt nervous about sharing their workdays with even their spouses, their partners, their loved ones. They felt like they should never refer to The work they did at Facebook, or that might be yet another thing that could get them fired. And so that increased their feelings of loneliness and alienation. And, you know, I think could potentially put some vulnerable people at risk. So that secrecy element is a real double edged sword.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  You mentioned earlier, Facebook, Google, any platform company, they always talk about AI. And that the real answer to this is we don't want to traumatize people. We understand we need to moderate. We're going to build these systems to recognize this stuff automatically. Do you think that is realistic? One thing that really struck me was they need to locate this facility here. They need to locate it in the countries that Facebook operates in because the amount of local context you need to make these decisions is so high. Can they actually solve this problem?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  You know, it's an open question for me. I'm not even sure that the moderators have the cultural context that they need. Like in some big ways, yes, like they understand American slang, maybe in a way that somebody in another country might not understand American slang. But moderators gave me all these examples of, you know, some figure would be in the news, like XXX Tentacion, like who died. And like, none of the moderators knew who he was. I shouldn't say none, most of them didn't. And because he's a public figure, he's subject to a different set of rules. So if you don't know that he's a public figure, then you're going to take the wrong action on a piece of content, which, you know, then could potentially put your job at risk.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  You know, when there is some major breaking trending news, Facebook does issue updates to the moderators. Although I was also shown several cases and other people have reported about times when Facebook has distributed erroneous information to the moderators. But in a lot of cases, these folks just don't have the cultural context that they need. And I think that something that the big platforms should think about is how they can empower their moderators with more context. You know, I talked to somebody who took down a diamond and silk video, which is like an explosive thing. If you've, you know, followed their antics in Congress over the past year. And it was just because she didn't know they were public figures and she saw two women ranting and she thought it was bullying. And so she took it down.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And then, you know, later she learned that they're public figures and that ranting is their shtick. And again, like she is the one that is going to suffer the consequence for having taken that wrong action, you know, and not Facebook for providing that cultural context. So absolutely the platforms need to think more about it.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Can they think about it enough so they can automate it with an AI system?

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Here's what I don't know is if all of these things were just much smaller, would we be better off? You know, somebody reached out to me from Wikipedia wanting to talk about how they do moderation there. So I'm really excited to talk with him because I think that they maybe have a better experience. You know, I'm on Reddit a fair bit and like Reddit seems like a site that is like, if you go to the right reddits, they're actually very well moderated. And because they're so community specific, like everyone who's moderating has the relevant context. So I do think there's something in just shrinking down the size of these groups probably does make make things easier. When you're talking about a platform that has 2 billion people, how do you distribute the appropriate cultural context for any single thing that could happen at any time?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  And then distribute it in 50 languages in 20 sites around the world? That does seem like a super hard problem to me.

• 28:50Nilay Patel?

  The Reddit comparison is particularly interesting because if you you just compare the main Facebook product, which is the news feed to Reddit, Reddit has however X million smaller news feeds. And then every thread inside of every subreddit is its own little news feed. And all of those can be moderated in RevCron by a community. But no one can sort of see the whole scope of the Facebook news feed. And so you have to break it up. And that might just be the design flaw of Facebook. It might just be the thing that can't be fixed. It seems like the problem is you can't ever make that thing smaller.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Facebook has like, you know, like any startup, you build a thing and you try to grow it really fast. And then you try to like fix the problems that pop up as as you're growing it. And, you know, this is not the first story about Facebook getting really big and being unable to, you know, handle one of the things that broke along the way.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  Do they think this is broken? I mean, that's really the fundamental question. The sort of Facebook people you talked to in the story, they struck me very much is, well, this is this is how it is. This is how everybody does it. This is how we're going to do it. Click a Chrome extension every, you know, eight seconds to let us know you're at work. And this is just how it goes.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  The official message is like, yes, we can do this. We know it's really hard. We're learning as we go. We want to do better. That's the, that is the official line. A frustration that I have is I don't feel like I actually got to talk to any of the real decision makers at Facebook about this. I didn't get to talk to whoever designed the system. I'm actually not sure who did design it, although, as you mentioned, this is the system that is used by most of the big tech platforms. But I think we need to have a conversation about this and, and that conversation is really about how do you make a lot more of these people full-time employees? And how do you pay them double what they're making?

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  If not triple.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  If not triple, yeah.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  It's not, they're not making a ton of money here. I, I think this conversation changes if instead of $28,000 a year or $29,000 a year. These are all people making a hundred plus thousand dollars a year.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Completely, completely. I even think at, at $60,000 a year, which is what you might pay a, a, a starting salary for a police officer. Like it's, it just starts to feel more fair. And when you're making 60 versus 28, you can afford better, better mental healthcare. Like obviously it's not a panacea. It just sort of feels like a starting point to me.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So what do you think happens next?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Well, Facebook called while we were having this conversation.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  So that, that will be a turn of the screw.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  You know, I'm going to continue this reporting. I have been so delighted by the response from other content moderators who want to talk with me about what they're seeing. At big companies and at small companies, there's clearly a lot of this that cuts across a variety of services. And I just think it's an important avenue for, for more reporting. We should know more about how this affects people. And we should know more about how platforms are going to support these people.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the hidden machinery of the entire internet and it's just a bunch of people clicking as fast as they can.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yes, there, there is something that is so wild about that. You know, one of the final points that the story makes is that this machinery is hidden from you on purpose. Like no one really has any incentive to let you know what's going on in the background. But I think we do need to start talking about it. It, it must've been like easy for some people to dismiss this work when it was all being done far overseas. You know, if you're an American reading this story or listening to this podcast, like these are your friends and neighbors. And, and like, that's a conversation that I think we should have to, not to say that the moderators in other countries don't deserve all the support and empathy as the Americans do, because they do. But I just think it's, it's harder to ignore here.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Casey, you write about this literally every day in the interface. You want to tell people how to get that?

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Sure. You can go to theverge.cominterface and find a link to sign up. And hey, if you know more about this story, you know, get in touch, tweet at me at Casey Newton, send me an email, [email protected].

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, Casey, thank you so much for doing the story. I thank you for coming on. I'm sure you're going to be making the media rounds this week, so look for Casey everywhere. But we got him first on the Vergecast. Thanks a lot, buddy.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, Neil.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that was Casey. If you haven't read The Trauma Floor yet, which is the story we were discussing on Facebook Moderators, go look on The Verge, search for it. It is riveting. It is wonderful. It's some of Casey's best work. I highly encourage you to read it and really think about the costs of keeping these platforms operating. And then let us know what you think, especially if you've worked in one of these facilities. We'll be back later this week with a regular Vergecast. That'll be wild. MWC is still in full swing. Foldable phones everywhere. And next week, very excited about this, Ashley Carmen and I interviewed Mike McNano, the CEO of Anchor, that's a little podcasting startup that just got bought by Spotify. For a number, well, we're going to try to make him tell us what the number was. We'll see you then.

• 33:33Speaker 05

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