They are based around the world. The people I spoke to while making our series The Moderators for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, were largely living in East Africa, and all had since left the industry.
Their stories were harrowing. Some of what we recorded was too brutal to broadcast. Sometimes my producer Tom Woolfenden and I would finish a recording and just sit in silence.
“If you take your phone and then go to TikTok, you will see a lot of activities, dancing, you know, happy things,” says Mojez, a former Nairobi-based moderator who worked on TikTok content. “But in the background, I personally was moderating, in the hundreds, horrific and traumatising videos.
“I took it upon myself. Let my mental health take the punch so that general users can continue going about their activities on the platform.”
There are currently multiple ongoing legal claims that the work has destroyed the mental health of such moderators. Some of the former workers in East Africa have come together to form a union.
“Really, the only thing that’s between me logging onto a social media platform and watching a beheading, is somebody sitting in an office somewhere, and watching that content for me, and reviewing it so I don’t have to,” says Martha Dark who runs Foxglove, a campaign group supporting the legal action.
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