Facebook content moderators say they receive little support, despite company promises

Despite Facebook’s repeated assurances that it would address poor workplace conditions for its content moderators, often contractors who spend their days reviewing graphic and violent images posted on the site, little has changed at the company, a former Facebook content moderator said in an interview that aired Monday on “NBC Nightly News.”Josh Sklar, a former Accenture subcontractor based in Austin, Texas, who moderated content for Facebook and Instagram from September 2018 through March, said that working conditions had scarcely improved for content moderators and that they continue to review large quantities of often traumatic posts. Sklar was one of approximately 15,000 people who spend hours a day combing through the dark side of the social network, flagging posts that violate its content policies.“You’re reviewing, you know, maybe hundreds of pieces of content a day, and of that content, a really healthy percentage of it is bad stuff,” he said. “I mean, we’re talking everything from hate speech, to animal mutilation, to videos of people committing suicide, child pornography.”Sklar said he was assigned to do this for over six hours every day, with few breaks, as disturbing images flooded into his queue. In one case, he said, a reconfigured algorithm that…
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