 Part of the job description was you will be part of a team that protects free speech online, which makes it seem very heroic. I felt like you were putting on a cape, working at Google. Over the past year, I've been reporting on the lives of Facebook's content moderators in America, and they've told me about their low pay, their dire working conditions, and in some cases, the long-term mental health consequences of doing the work that they do. A content moderator is kind of like a police officer for the internet. If you ever see something that you think doesn't belong on a site and you report it, that report is going to be reviewed by a human being. And while a lot of what they see is really benign, like spam, for example, some of it's really disturbing. I'm talking about murder, terrorism, and child exploitation. Recently I started seeking out people who did this kind of work for Google and YouTube. I wanted to see how their experiences compared to the ones I'd heard about already. And what I did learn surprised me. Part of doing our job and how they would make us kind of feel better about it was that you guys see this so other people don't have to see this, right? Over the course of my reporting, I talked to both people who worked at Google full time and people who had been hired on through third-party contractors. It became clear to me that no matter who hired you, doing this job over a long enough time period can cause significant mental health consequences. But it also became clear to me that there is a big difference in how Google employees get treated and how those third-party contractors get treated. Today, a former full-time Google employee named Daisy Soderberg Rivkin is going on the record to talk about her experiences as a content moderator. She had access to all the perks and all the benefits that come with being a full-time Google employee. But at the end of the day, that didn't save her from the consequences of doing the job. I was a legal root removals associate, which is a very fancy way of saying I was a content moderator at Google. Let's talk about what the job actually was. You show up, you have your orientation, you sit down at your computer, it's time to do your job. What is your job? So you usually start your work by going through a queue. So you're assigned to a queue based on either an issue area or geographic area. So I focused on the French market because my first languages were French and English. And I also worked on our child sexual abuse imagery cases and our terrorism cases. And you were working primarily on web search, right? Yes. We, as in-house content moderators, we would usually handle more high-level complex issues. So certain things that were very high volume, such as defamation and copyright, were typically sent over to contractors. They would then escalate to us if it was kind of a gray area. And if it was even a gray area for us, we would then escalate to our counsel. So it was kind of levels of how specialized we were. At what point did you start to feel like you were seeing more disturbing stuff than you expected? Very early on, they said we would be analyzing child sexual abuse imagery. But I remember very clearly in parentheses it said this kind of content would be limited to one to two hours per week. But in reality, we were understaffed. So we would be in there sometimes five, six hours a week, which is, it sounds like nothing, but it's actually. Oh, it sounds like a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. When did you first notice that doing this job was starting to affect your mental health? When I was walking around San Francisco, actually, and I was with one of my friends, and we saw a group of kids, the toddlers, that were hanging on to one of those ropes so that they don't go far. I looked at them, and then I kind of blinked once, and suddenly I just had a flash of images of some of the images I had seen, children being tied up, children being raped, at that age. You know, this is three, three years old. I kind of stopped, and I was kind of blinking a lot, and my friend had to make sure I was okay, and I had to sit down for a second, and I just exploded crying. She was like, what just happened? And I couldn't explain it to her, and I just these racing thoughts. And then an instant panic attack. I was having nightmares. I wasn't sleeping. I had spent multiple days just crying in the bathroom, and I was having all of these panic attacks, and my work productivity just dipped. And finally, my manager was like, listen, we really need you to step up your productivity game. And I just snapped, and I turned to him, and I said, do you understand what we're looking at? And we're not machines. We're humans. So we have emotions, and those emotions are deeply scarred by looking at children being raped all the time, and people getting their heads chopped off. It was like there was no escape. And yeah, I finally snapped, and they took that as, oh, she needs to take a second. She needs to breathe. And I said, no, I need to leave. The free food, the nap pods, all these benefits, this doesn't mean anything if this is my day to day. Daisy helped me understand how hard this job is to do even when you work in the greatest office in the world. But the truth is that most people don't work in an office half that nice. One of Google's biggest projects that it has to moderate, of course, is YouTube. And when it comes to YouTube, Google has decided to give most of the work of content moderation to third party contractors. Recently I went to Austin, Texas to meet with a group of moderators who work for Accenture on the YouTube project. Specifically they work on what is called the VEQ, VE standing for violent extremism. 120 times a day they review YouTube videos that have terrorism, graphic violence, and other disturbing content. We're about to hear from one of them and we've altered the audio to protect their identity. In some ways, the content moderators who do this work for Google and YouTube are treated better than the ones who work for Facebook. Most prominently, they get two hours of break time each day, basically two hours of paid leave in which they can recover from the challenges of doing this work. But most of them aren't able to take a full two hours a day. So they're constantly reminding you how easily you can be replaced. When I brought all this to Google, the company told me that it takes the health of its workers very seriously and pointed out that it offers on-site counseling to both its full-time employees and to its contractors. I think it's worth pointing out though that even though Daisy had access to that on-site counseling, the counselor she had ultimately told her to go seek outside help and get a therapist. Daisy also eventually took medical leave and ultimately got an emotional support animal to help her. It's a dog named Stella. Look, high five. I found a psychiatrist and I found a therapist. The psychiatrist put me on antidepressants. I was diagnosed with carnic anxiety and PTSD. And then I started seeing a therapist just to talk through these things. And she said, is legal removals associate anything close to a content moderator? And I said, it is a content moderator. And she said, trust me when I say you are not the first person that I've seen with this particular issue. It seems like recovering from doing this job has itself been a full-time job. Oh yeah. Whenever someone talks to me about content moderation, I say, I'm a recovering content moderator. They're like, oh, you talk about it like it's like alcoholism. And I said, well, you never fully recover. One of the things that is so interesting to me about your story is that you were one of the very few people I've talked to who did content moderation as a full-time employee of a company rather than a contractor. You had access to six months of paid medical leave. A contractor who's like moderating for YouTube in Austin doesn't have that same access. I had those months to think about my choices and to think about ways out without having to deal with unemployment or having to deal with how am I going to pay rent? And I know those contractors don't have that opportunity. The contractors I've talked with in Austin are making $18,000, $15,000 an hour, about $37,000 a year. Does that seem like a high enough wage given some of the risks involved? Absolutely not. There's never going to be enough money to make this okay. And I'm going to be clear about that. But I think that you need to pay contractors proportional to what they're going through, the impact of their work, because this is so vital to the business. Let's put a fine point on it. Google can't exist without the work that you did, right? Like you were responding to official legal requests from governments that would have otherwise shut Google down in their country if you didn't respond. Exactly. So this is very high stakes work. And yet for some reason, these companies have just chosen not to value it. Yeah, I think that contractors are so essential, especially considering how much volume we have. We need as many people as we can doing this work. We also need to change the overall system and the overall structure of how this work is being done, how we support these people, how we give them tools and resources to deal with these things, or else these problems are only going to get worse.