YouTube moderators forced to sign statement acknowledging job can give them PTSD
There are risks that people can understand and appreciate up front.<p>There are risks that simply are not fully conciously appreciated until they&#x27;ve been experienced directly.<p>There are risks whose cumulative effects only build with time, often taking years, even decades, to fully manifest.<p>And there are risks <i>which fundamentally change the capacity of the affected to even recognise or admit their existence or severity.</i><p>PTSD is all of these.<p>Self-monitoring, encouragement to seek help, and provision of a nonclinical &quot;wellness coach&quot; is grossly insufficient.<p>The companies, and in this case, contractors (Accenture), providing such services, as well as outside oversight entities such as government regulators, physical and mental health services, unions, and insurers, know (or damned well should), can monitor, and impose regulations, limits, risk premiums, compensation and settlement systems, and collective bargaining powers, for such work.<p>Business is a risk-externalising engine.  Some risks absolutely need to be fully internalised.  This is a prime case.<p>NB:  I&#x27;ve worked at various times as a moderator, on spam-detecting and reporting systems which entail seeing some unpleasantness.  And on a large social media network where I was tasked with removing flagged images from the storage network.  The flagging process hadn&#x27;t been explained in any detail, and as I would be deleting millions of items of user content, I spot-checked a small handful to confirm the flagging was accurate.<p>After no more than a half dozen (and probably fewer) I simply didn&#x27;t <i>want</i> to see any more -- the image from over a decade of a young girl still lodges in my mind, though I&#x27;ve never wiped, nuked, and shredded files on disk harder.<p>I&#x27;m satisfied with the fact that the scripts I created wiped all that content from our and our CDN&#x27;s storage not in the weeks or months of the initial estimate (our CDN vendor apparently had never considered widespread deletions, or experienced them), but less than two days, with verification.  Never heard any reports of unwarranted deletion either.<p>Somewhere else within the organisation, unknown to me, others <i>had</i> seen and verified those images.  I think of who they might have been and the impacts on them.