My Life As A Covalen Worker

Introduction

At the time I write this our multi-party litigation has been ongoing for almost 8 years and counting. 720 employees are protesting for the removal of a 6-month cooling period - meaning that we cannot apply for any vendor associated with Meta, and against an actual severance package of 600€, which is laughably poor and insulting for the work they do. This is the story of working at Meta, for the Covalen sub-contractor. 

Undercounted layoffs reported by the media like with ourselves in Ireland, isolated to regions miss the bigger story or message. It should be noted that, during the lockdown, Simon Harris granted frontline exemptions to certain pivotal and frontline staff.  But not enough of common decency for better pay, working conditions or the privilege to say they were employees of Meta. From First World countries like America and Ireland to Kenya, India and Philippines thousands of people are roped into roles where they have review and label everything from execution, child pornography, live shootings, torture, bestiality and more. Don't worry about pay because all of this could be yours for 26,000€ - 41,000€ . In other countries you can be doing it for a lot less, some for as little as $2 an hour. 

Oh you don't want to work the role? That's alright because none of us actually signed up for this duty. A lot of these roles are labelled Language, Software as a Service, Legal, AI, some as customer support work and so on. No warnings or labelling on the roles. Safety measures which have been known since the 2000s are nowhere in sight in reaching your daily quotas, unable to skip harmful tickets. 

The greatest trick these platforms pulled off is convincing the public we don't exist or aren't skilled. Optics praising the work we do in front of podcasters, government officials all the while downplaying the impact of the job or acknowledging its existence. 

Keep in mind these roles specifically hire degree holders or people with IT experience: highly skilled, intelligent and being able to withstand months of highly stressful and traumatic workloads. 

Step right up… government-backed lobbyist meant to shock and awe you on high paying roles while creating generations of skilled employees with adjustment disorders, suicidal tendacies and PTSD, just don’t let them look behind the curtains of the Silicon Valley smoke show!  

Chapter 1: A Poorly Made Hotdog Grinder 

Like many millennials in Ireland getting into their profession during and after the post 2010 recession, it was a bleak struggle. No matter your degree or skill, getting your first role without prior experience was difficult. Even roles in retail or fast food chains had hundreds of recently laid off people who had careers prior to the crash applying the same as yourself. By sheer determination, internships and willpower, I was able to attain a 11 month contract doing cloud support with SAP, during which I gained various SAP certifications troubleshooting, XML and support skills. I did a few other contracts afterwards, gaining experience in SAAS, Cloud and Meraki Technologies. I knew getting into a permanent role or internal role would be difficult. After years of the recession left many people with large gaps in their resumes or thousands of people with the same skills set competing for entry roles. After finishing a contract with Cisco, I got a call in 2017. ”The recruiter said that you applied for a technical support role for a social media company and we are looking for people. We would like to schedule an interview”, it was said during the call. The recruiter was well known in my country with contracts with healthcare, IT, and had knowledge of my neurodivergence with my SAP role that I worked in 2015. 

The interviews were fairly standard. Questions relating to ticket priority, technical skills in troubleshooting. At the end of the 3 rounds it quickly evolved to being a community analyst with a slight chance of seeing something offensive. I want to break down the word offensive because it was also used another time in the contract. Offensive can mean someone's opinion, a statement or saying. Sometimes in IT or corporate work they can or will say offensive things. Customers can be rude, a colleague can say something sexist or offensive. This happens in all professions. 

But it was affirmed to me over the phone that it doesn't happen often. While speaking to her I also asked if there was any chance of moving to the customer service team which I had previously been in as this was originally a technical support role. She said of course the company has a lot of positions once you pass probation. To be honest, looking back, if I said I wanted to be CEO of Meta they would have agreed. 

In reality what they meant or maybe didn't want to disclose was that the role will make you a witness to disturbing scenes. It will shock and horrify you and it will happen on a daily basis. There is a major difference between offensive like something you hear in a bar and disturbing. Most people can handle offense but to deal with the disturbing was another matter. Instead of the Modern Chic Dublin Docklands of Meta Ireland HQ, it was a half-built barren Beckett Building. Rooms filled with glass windows overlooked the Dublin Inner City streets, full of sterile furniture with some rooms in mid construction or decorated with synthetic light as bright as the Vegas Strip. Each floor, while modern, lacked any human presence. There was an open-space office layout where each moderator had to lock any form of evidence of their work away every night before the next load of employees began their shift. 

Training consisted of a slide show presentation at the time. To the public, users get a single page of rules and regulations. A moderator deals with a 13 page manifesto of rules and regulations that changes once a week, mostly on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Changes can greatly impact your quality score from grammar, updates on what's allowed and not allowed. When topics of CSAM in the training deck came up about it was replaced with a clothed anime girl. Being  a weeb myself, some of the tagalog (one of the main languages of the Philippines) market was being trained, and I laughed at it being fictional and not even suggestive. The training was only 2 weeks before we were sent to the frontlines of the floors overlooking the side street between Spencers Dock and East Wall Business Park. Our group assumed these were first of all  edge cases, seldom occurring, and secondly, that the job would consist of mostly reviewing Pepe memes. They were hiring at one point during the 2016 American Presidential Race. One does question why a multi-billion dollar company would only provide a slide show for onboarding educated employees for a role that is the most potentially damaging mentally and physically

It's the only reason why it's allowed to operate in every country. Why not proper training and mental fortitude instead of this smoke and mirrors of slide show presentation and wellness snake oil, we can only ask in hindsight? 

Something sticks out in hindsight during the training. The instructor repeated during training that it is for the greater good, something which would be repeated all throughout my time here. Do not mention what you do in your job to friends or family. Just say you are reviewing funny memes. 

8 years later that greater good line fills me with a mixture of dread and anger. It is pseudo-programming which reflects something straight out of a Waco compound. Yes, I’m slightly bitter about the multi-level marketing lingo used that feels more like a conditioning of a Multi-Level Marketing Scheme than a normal IT business environment or company regardless of political leanings. These are repeated weekly and at every Townhall meeting along with high praise of some distant moderator for doing his job. It was never mentioned whether he was internal or one of our crew. 

Social media is a lot like hot dogs in nature. Everyone wants to consume them but no one wants to see how it's made or managed. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's good for the economy as long as it makes money and appears to create good jobs. What wasn’t disclosed to us before we began was that in 2017* an SRT tool - which stands for single review tool used to moderate content - leaked the private information of 150 content moderators to extremists, hate groups and terrorist organisations. I was hired a few months after this incident. It is only upon researching my own case and helping other moderators globally I found out. 

The only moderator incident that was disclosed was about an Egyptian moderator that leaked the training decks to the Guardian, which was used as the reason for why we couldn't work from home. 

Chapter 2: The Nail That Sticks Out

As we approached the floor and were handed out laptops, you could see the quotas of tickets in various queues over time approaching service level agreements. You can't skip a single ticket. Given 80 seconds to decide not only ignore, delete or censor but apply the numerous labels for each one. Between political unrests happening in Uganda and major arrests in Zimbabwe, my first day on the floor was impactful in more than one way. You will see a lot of content mod/ ai job reviews from some saying the job is boring - these are the benign reviews a lot of companies would leave on sites. It is technically true but that is the danger of the role. The tickets are a hidden game of roulette on the brain. You may deal with 70-130 tickets of mundane posts and videos. But it's the 15 tickets a day that disturb your soul; others are worse. There is no warning or alert when it happens and your judgement will affect quality. Every ticket is a potential edge case. One ticket can just be a gaming group throwing slurs and another can be a group dedicated to the Yulin dog meat festival seeing a poor animal being tortured on your screen.

The Human trafficking ticket is one of the disturbing tickets you come across on the job and my only quote that got headlines later on. An African man duct taped to a seat being beaten with a plank of wood with nails in it. When he wouldn't die the captors used a knife repeatedly on him to finish the job as you saw the life leave his eyes. Even the most hardened human would be shocked and I doubt even many law enforcement frontline staff would sleep well at night seeing it. But what the papers didn't report is the next part. I marked the ticket to be deleted clearly - It's an execution video. One of the most bizarre features of the role is QA review. On average a moderator will deal with one ticket every 80 seconds. A QA will take 15 tickets at random for your score. Then take you into a small white room devoid of personality bigger than a cubby hole but smaller than a classroom with just a small desk and monitor. That ticket I mentioned was marked wrong as they couldn't see blood. You will have to then “debate” them to change it while rewatching the footage. Like a surreal Danganronpa-style system where you are arguing why murder should or should not be on the platform using 13-page internal policies that change weekly. This occurred weekly for most people. “You see this girl in the photo is a schoolgirl therefore should be removed for CSAM”. “What is your reasoning,” the QA would ask. “You see she's wearing a school skirt and I can see part of her nipple”. 13 wrong decisions at any point can result in you losing your job. This was a weekly occurrence in the role. A viral video or post can radically alter your grading in a day. You may imagine that I was making this up, but this is how the system worked. In 2021 Josh Sklar, a former content moderator, quit his role in disgust and created a post as his grand exit. This is a quote from it.

Chapter 3: Blair Day Pay 

The second day into the job I got my first bestiality ticket. I have no idea what level of hell these sick disturbed people get off to having sexual relations with a animal horse or pig, but also to post them in a group on Facebook. If hell does exist they should be there. By the end of the second week I hit my beginner resilience quota limit after witnessing my first CSAM. It was not anime, nor consensual. I quickly dodged to the bathroom completely devoid of color on my face and vomited. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this reaction; this is a human reaction. I gave myself a few minutes trying to clear my mind and stomach to recover and splashed some water on my face before I slowly returned to the floor. My current manager asked me if I drank too much prior to my shift. I said I dealt with my first child abuse CSAM ticket. He laughed and said you will get used to it. I know I haven't said much about my team or the atmosphere. 

It's hard to describe. In the beginning months the building was half-built in the lane between East Point Business Park and Spencers Dock. When we started the evening shift 6pm-2am you could smell the hashish from the Turkish day team in the hallways. They were self-medicating from the daily shocks of terrorism and hate. All were promised something different and some weren't even given contracts before they began working on the frontlines. 

My team was UKIA - mostly Irish newly grads and a surly 50 year Brit and 2 Arabic lads doing technical queue tickets (checking IDs, legacy tickets). They were already battle hardened in the style of a frog in a boiling pot. Being hired earlier in the year and moved to Beckett, they mostly worked in the Instagram queue on porn and posts before gradually getting into the heavier tickets I first got. I got along mostly with Croatians, Filipinos and some Arabic lads and a gorgeous Persian girl on my shift. I always felt a connection to immigrants no matter where I work or travel. As someone neurodivergent, we are slightly disconnected from most, and having my own parents immigrate to America made me related to them. At the time I also thought I got along with most of my team like soldiers in the trenches of battle. But between the cognitive disconnect of my own neurodivergence and the fact that they got hired together there was a divide. Groups that got hired together tend to connect better than a single new person or two joins. As moderators you deal with the same shocks at the same time. The nature of the job was competitive to a toxic level. You were working with an almost unfathomable amount of tickets, groups, pages, photos, racist memes, and gore at unsocial hours and shifts. You had to constantly hit your quota. Making sure you always hit 95% quality hoping you will get enough brownie points from the team leaders to get accepted into a position where you aren't dealing with as much beheading or CSAM. There weren't huge differences in pay but after dealing thousands of tickets a month, any breathing room was a welcome escape and the minor promotion made you feel like you were one step closer to moving out of the floors.

Early December it was announced that quality was being increased from 95 to 98% weekends needed.

I'm fully aware of the pound of flesh I had to pay. Paying your dues. I'm sure many of our parents told us to put in time to get an internal role or good pay. Working as a contract role to get a foot in the door of a company proves to others I can do the work and go beyond expectations for an internal role. That's the name of the game when building a career. My parents were hard grafters. Irish Immigrants who travelled to America in the late 70s/early 80s working in Corporate and Bartending in the City that Never Slept. In my mind that was what kept me going and that and everything was normalised in the most surrealist of ways. Most of the team and other languages all accepted and responded to the role like it was any day job at least on the surface. You almost become a part of the internal community of dark perspectives and gallows humor. Every mid-week meeting you are often told you are soldiers in the trenches , greater good lingo repeated and in the same breath you are reprimanded if numbers are low and not to mention the job outside of work. It's not like you had much of a life afterwards. You were possibly working 40-70 hours a week with revolving days off to keep up with the demands of tickets doing night work. We were told we needed to work Christmas that year. We had 2 choices. 

We could either bring in a form to work at home or work in Grand Canal for the day. Considering some of the tickets could be CSAM, extremism, etc. I chose the office while the Beckett was closed for Xmas. 

Chapter 4: Season Greetings from Coffin Row 

Well this is what was promised, and that was your expectation. Working at Silicon Docks. But now empty devoid of much human presence. Working in what is mostly an empty building with none of the benefits. Normally, you would consider doing something for the greater good of the public and the platform. A role like that would be considered important. In some countries, it may even have been crucial for the platform's legal operation. Because of that, you would expect there to be some benefits associated with working in the main office.

Barely a scrap of food, just bare desks with a few moderators skewed across the floor with security doing rounds making sure they aren’t doing anything. Their beer taps and fridges empty. Leaving you to the queues and silence outside the videos you had to review. Funny enough Christmas is not a huge time for reported posts and videos outside some neo-nazi groups being posted. While it can be a bleak time for many over the holidays, reporting is not high on most agendas for most. You are just left there with your laptop and tickets. 

Between adjusting to the hours and the content while working I was content and making my numbers but by late January I was almost robotic and in a world of my own. My own friends and family had noticed it. Instead of enjoying time out with them, I was distant. I couldn’t describe or say anything properly at the time. Someone would ask me ”how was work” and I could not respond with anything because I was barred by an NDA.

Like the main character in Tetsou:Iron Man, I don't know if I was being made to be more of an algorithm than man. Slowly stripped of being able to determine what's normal or shocking. A normal post could be happy birthday or something so unhinged - but you would have to analyse it numerous times to find out if  it was against policies. Because of the late hours I needed to get a lift home. I had to get a lift home from the Joneses, an elderly Boer couple who worked in ground truth, a sub-section of moderation. On the surface they seemed like your ordinary couple. Underneath was completely different. They were former police officers from the Arpetheid Era whose stories would have made any hate group get a full hard on from their interrogation of witnesses. 

“Ag man, have I ever told you about that investigation where I put proper pressure on a witness by rubberhosing them, hey? Different world, snowflakes now,” he says while we drove down the M50 back to Kildare. 

Imagine after dealing with the dregs of humanity till 2 AM only to get a lift from a couple that thought it was perfectly normal to stick a suspect’s head in a shoebox with scorpions in it. You think working in a “Liberal” company, the bare minimum requirement was not to be openly a psychopath. The surreal irony of getting a lift home after dealing with violence and racism is to hear more violence and racism. I didn't have any options for getting alternative transportation. It's not like the role paid enough to get an apartment nearby. 

Chapter 5: Brits are at It Again 

As I began to fully adjust to the late shifts, the nights began to blur as I started to become slightly numb to the shocks within the tickets. The concept of days was devoid of meaning. By the time you get to sleep it could be hours after your shift as your mind still processes the shift’s videos, only to wake up and get ready to repeat the process. There was a sudden uptick in tickets and with that we got a new team member, a sound Muslim guy from Shankil. Before he even had a chance to adjust to shocks of tickets, we all got an announcement that shocked the company. 

A partner company that was working with Meta broke their terms and compromised over 87 million accounts worldwide through a personality quiz. I would estimate at least 10% of moderators' accounts were affected globally. When the world got these news through news sources we found out the night before on a Work@Fb post. All of our personal accounts had to be locked down and any mention of our roles on Linkedin had to be changed. The incident is now called the Cambridge Analytica scandal. An event that changed the course for ourselves and the world in the space of 24 hours. The work we did, which used to be labelled as pivotal to the platform, became a liability to them. We became ghosts to the world. Before we all had a chance to digest the events. None of us really had a chance to fully digest the escalation and what it meant to us at the time as another breach was around the corner. By his second week into the role getting used to the daily nervous shocks things escalated dramatically. A moderator from another team brought in a blade into the office . Our new team member spotted another moderator cleaning the blade in the bathroom. He completely freaked out and went pale from what he saw. He reported it to security and our manager. Within a few minutes of what happened the Garda armed in riotgear and shields burst through the building, swarming every floor as we attempted to do our tickets while our screens were filled with tickets reviewing animal torture and UK First. The real life escalation had hit our floors sending everyone in a panic. Some moderator teams cower underneath their desks while others are being screamed at by their team leaders. “Get the Fuck back to work” was heard in the background by everyone on our floor. You could hear the deathening screams of moderators from various languages as they witnessed the events unfold before them. When the sweep was done we had to continue the job like nothing happened. There wasn’t an official sit down or adjustment period afterwards to help us break down what happened. For team leaders their job was to get us back on the queues. 

I don’t recall if we got a reasoning of what happened but that team leader who screamed, my colleague and the suspect never came back nor was any information about the incident told to us. When people leave or are forced to leave the role, they just don't return. Rumors at the time were that the suspect was a member of Golden Dawn, a Far Right group based out of Greece.

At this point I had to start taking SSRI medication to stay calm in this role, survive and mentally cope. It was like something from a John Gresham novel. We would now work for “the client”. 

Chapter 6: Repeat Offenders, Different Label 

There were always repeat offenders: users that never gave up. To them, it was like their posts and groups were being removed as some part of a sick game only they knew about, always more disturbing. First was The Toilet, a group based in the UK. The content was unsettling to your core and that these people existed around you is unnerving. From praising execution footage, to Live Leak and animal torture remixed with Ibiza hits and Darude. No matter how many times you deleted them they returned just labelling the group as 2.0 or a variation of the name. Each time it got worse, escalating to the extreme dark web content each time. Ham Activists were another I use the term because, well, they still have supporters sucking off the teeth of the public. Far Right stooges declaring war against minorities, showing their own propaganda along with footage of minors with semi-automatics chanting for the death of African-Americans. How were they allowed on the platform? We could only speculate why. They have legal teams to avoid phrasing, their categories changed numerous times. These are the tame tickets that are widely known. The true edge cases are too disturbing in nature to discuss. 

Chapter 7: March Madness 

March was the hardest period of the year. We saw a huge uptick in everything. Huge amount of hatred towards Irish and Muslims. Millions of posts occurred during this time. The Irish hatred was mostly a mix of football, Love Island and jealousy from St Paddy’s Day. Comments and groups dedicated to hating Irish, paddys and taigs. You could feel the vitriol in their posts and threats. 

The Muslim hatred is a little more complicated. On one hand there has always been hostility to Muslims over the years but then there was a huge misinformation campaign with a story about Muslims boycotting a Tesco in the UK for Halal chocolate. I ask you, "How does chocolate bleed?”. More importantly upon a google search there was no tesco in the town mentioned in that story. Like modern day urban legends, Friend of a Friend stories escalate to racist manifestos and rumours in the online era. Meanwhile I could see my Muslim colleagues munching on chocolate easter eggs to nibble on in the workplace during the holidays. 

Outside the office Ireland was in Repeal fever. The city streets filled with campaign posters featuring images from a recalled infamous barbie dolls and American lobbyists dressed as handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale to reject the repeal vote, which had dumb irony to it in a way since most of these lobbyists were American and The Handmaid’s Tale pro-choice, not pro-life. Behind the screen was another story. Ever seen Telebingo on RTE, where the lottery numbers were being read out by Panti Bliss: “B88 a big fat steak”? Our screens had a surreal version of this - filled with anonymous groups created by thousands of very suspicious accounts of people with Irish first names and Russian last names generating pro-life memes with no comments. A digital powerball of pro-life imagery, supposed dead babies that looked like screenshots from Cannibal Holocaust, a 1970s grindhouse film in front of our glowing screens. This was also my first time seeing effects of the algorithm on the day of the repeal, getting headbutted randomly by a woman for wearing a pro-choice pin in a bar in town. I’ve also dissociated from a few former friends and family who fell down the rabbit role of conspiracy theories. Normally I would put up with stories but when they keep sending you poorly edited anti-semitic videos at 4 AM and even after a few warnings they don't stop, I had to end my contact with them. I was dealing with these things at work. I didn't need unwarranted messages in my private life. 

During this time I saw changes with people on the team as well over the months. With the competitive nature of the role and trying to reach Employee of the Month, some were getting addicted to the extreme content to get their dopamine hits. The job changes you, not at first but over time. It is a slow decay of your defenses with each shock. Even now I’ve seen the effects on former content moderators affect them daily. For myself, I felt numb outside of work. It’s hard to disconnect from the job when your job is the reality of the worst of humanity. 

Chapter 8: Great Escape 

Harlan Ellison, a Science Fiction writer, had a story about an AI seeking revenge: I Have No Mouth and I MMust Scream. That was my mindset at the time. I knew I couldn't keep going this way. I was keeping up with quality but nonstop weekends, the extreme content, long hours... I was coping but I certainly wasn't living or enjoying life. I was doing wellness but counselling seemed futile. You would have a 20 minute session with a counsellor that couldn't do anything for you before going back to deal with the content that put you there. It did seem like a good place to cry without your team seeing you. I started applying for internal roles. I did extra hours to help with the backlog that was said to help out with the high volume and volunteered for a day to help a Silicon Valley employee with giving a school group a tour. I was putting in 110% effort to get through the invisible barrier set before us, all the while applying for internal roles in the company. By May of 2018 I did close to 8k in groups and pages with 99.7% before I applied for the assistant manager role but was unable to get past the 3rd round.

Before the end of the month I had to do 2 weeks of day shifts being trained in legacy tickets. One of the tickets I came across was the Self Harm group which to this day it still affects me.

It sends haunting chills and triggers when I hear or anything related to this nature. But the timing and the ticket had lasting consequences for my future at the company. 

Chapter 9: Surprise! You are a Star 

What started as a normal day in this surreal environment got serious quickly as our security had been breached again. All the teams got brought into the classroom with the CEO of the company that hired us. “We had a security breach and as a result some of our teams have been recorded working on the queues. It turned out one of the day team hires was an investigative reporter filming us working on tickets and our meetings. We braced ourselves. That was our team group discussion, that was me doing that ticket. A cold sense of dread took hold over me. It made headlines in all the papers. The company was made to answer to the Government. Every second ticket any of us had to send to different language moderators because all the abuse was aimed at us personally. “F U PC police”, “I hope they are shot”, etc. By then the long hours and the knowledge of this had started affecting us. Quality fluctuated a lot over the coming months. I’d also been drinking heavier through the year not during or before shifts but when I could it helped. 

Chapter 10: So Long And Thanks For The Fish 

By October my quality was dipping to 89%. I was put on a Personal Improvement Plan and quickly forced out the door. The damage was done both mentally and socially. What became of the entire world's worklife and social life for the last 11 months washed down the drain. Because of the shifts and secretive nature of the job your mind adapts to accept it as your entire life. 

Thank you for your service, you are now a liability to us was the message. I was left damaged and isolated. Like many before me and after. You are only as good to the Company as the coffee filter of the day. Rinse and repeat. 

I attempted to get support from the client and the recruiters at the time. I am pretty sure I was put on a list from the client. The recruiter’s message to me at the time was “Sorry,, you don't have any skills at the moment, why don't try to hand out resumes in your hometown”. I have been told this line before when I was 16 or during the recession but after getting certs in BCFE , numerous internships, professional certs from SAP and my foot in the career ladder from prior roles. This felt personal, cold. After 11 months of work that damaged me to the depths of my own madness. I wracked my brain trying without results for 6 months to get work left to my own thoughts to pick myself back up. 

During that time I called up a former colleague and fellow moderator who left the company a few months prior, that surly English man on a cold overcast day who left earlier that year also going through his own pain. We sat in a coffee shop outside Jervis and saw him break down in tears. 

That surly English man was Chris Grey. 

Two different generations of men equally left the role at different times with the exact same effect. We weren't the same person when we started the role. I seeked out Jennifer O’ Connell of the Irish times because at the time, she was the only Journalist who covered Irish Moderators’ stories months prior to the Google pay increase. I used a pseudonym Alex English because we didn't really know if the NDA was enforceable even without Meta, a company with connections to every government on the planet. I did a few interviews about my time which I do wish I could have articulated better but I was still raw and picking up the pieces of my mind. Chris found Colemans and I didn't argue with him taking the lead plaintiff. I was very aware of the Optics of the time. It's one thing when a 50 year old takes on an employer and another when a neurodivergent Irish-American during the height of incel attacks happening globally takes on a former employer. When we went to go for the injury board evaluation it was only then I realised what damage was done to me. The bombardment of toxic material, constant fear of dropping your quality and late shifts unable to take any proper time off has taken its effect. 

We went through rebranding while awaiting our time. I focused on upskilling while doing Technical Support, Desktop Engineering, Countless Microsoft certs, Clasp+ while masking what I have been through. Chris became the face of the multi litigation which started to grow. While I was damaged, I was not broken. I’m a fighter in spirit and even if I was broken continue onwards. We held the line while the Firm built our cases and numbers grew. 

Chapter 11: Present Day, Present Time 

You think you can disconnect but you can’t. 

It's not just the Platform but the mixture of the environment and knowing its all reality: every bit of content, hatred and traumatic material. You absorbed the Dark Patterns at the heaviest peaks. For a company its message was to help people connect. It left us isolated.

Ironically when I left the same people were in power as they are today. The recruiter and client also changed brands, same tactics being used but different office locations over time, same results in happening with their employees. In 2021, Isabella Plunkett, a former moderator, took the Stage with the help of Foxglove, an activist and legal company designed to empower tech workers. 

That same year another moderator - Ibrahim Halawa - also spoke out on prime-time television about his role as content moderator in Ireland. You would think with an ID leak, 30 person multi class litigation and two more whistleblowers, an investigation would happen or at the very  least something would change or improve since. If we had to wait for our own time at least it may improve for others that took our spaces in the seats. Both nationally and globally its been proven its not a normal IT role. There is a high risk of trauma. Academics and documentaries have covered it over the years. It has even been mentioned in Congress hearings and a couple of horror movies focused on this. In 2021 Simon Harris gave content moderators Frontline Status which meant they had to commute to the office during the height of the COVID lockdowns. No special protection beyond that. 

Seeing the current people in the picket line getting the same wages as back then, I wonder what happened and why there were no improvements. Surely with time passing and the stories being verified worldwide something would change.

It was only in 2023 that the HSA created suggestions on Content moderator guidelines. Recently in 2026, I've tried pushing for mandatory measures for safety. This was weeks before the Layoffs got announced. 

While I knew it was a long stretch to get any help or support for people in my former role. I had to try something. These weren't radical concepts. Cyberforsenics, Academics and former moderators have been advocating proper labelling of roles , pixelation on extreme content and the ability to change workloads or have the pay and support to deal with the platform content. 

During this time hundreds of Kenyan moderators started unionising and have started their own case against Meta which is currently in process. From 2025-2026 Meta announced its removing its BPO business model while the Content Moderators/AI began to blend into each other's roles. The new evolution creating its own version of Stephen King inspired trauma. Instead of reviewing the horror numerous times, these would have to label every horrific disturbing scene uploaded to the platform or write thousands of self hate and self harm for 8-10 hours a day like something out of the Overlook 

Hotel and modern typewriter. These roles were labelled under AI and legal titles but the same mislabelling, never mentioning the content you actually deal with. 

Data is High Risk but not the Employee health and wellbeing core message. Hundreds of employees got refused visas resulting in protesting only to be at risk again for the current layoffs because after dealing with harsh conditions, irresponsible employers and wages that have not been reflecting even the current market. They are being let go, unable to work for 6 months due to a cool off period. Remember how long it took me to even get back in the job market. I found out only because of the layoffs and protests because it's baked into the vendors agreement not employee contracts. I’ve attended a few of their picket lines in support. This is their time on the battleline and headlines. 

Final Thoughts

In the IT industry you are either a 1 or 0. The only thing that separates the two is how the industry looks at you and what job you may accept. 

Moderators and AI staff are treated like disposable coffee filters by the industry. Some deal in CP, others are made to do self harm prompts to make sure the ai doesn't do it for the user. They are doing these roles that do potential damage to them for the greater good and clients say that “contractors are of lower Intelligence compared to our internal staff”. I have rebranded and retrained while repeating the same call awaiting for my time. Our litigation has grown to 30 people. For every month since 2019 I kept making the same call hoping for slight changes to our case, some hope and light at the end of the long legal battle. 

During these numerous years of different roles and various volunteering slowly reclaiming small ounces of humanity I lost. Now I’m trying to help other content moderators and AI annotation people with the help of Foxglove, Data CWU and AI labellers Association while doing what I can legally and safely. Helping to fight for Dignity and solidary in this broken part of the industry that no government bodies want to properly address. These companies have become a billion euro global blood diamond industry to those who survive their experience. While users get their dopamine fix, behind the screens many of us, we were the insurance for the addiction and misinformation the platform pumped through users eyes and silenced by NDAs and policies. 

This isn't a novel industry at this point anymore. As Wired has reported on these stories as far back as back as 2014. Everyone has seen the effects of social media from their friends and family. They even started making horror films based on mine and other stories from behind the screen. 

Dr. Beckett of the University of Melbourne gave us the name “the Modern Sin Eaters”. We take on sins of not just human nature but the cold sterile Industry while wearing social masks. Ghosts of our former selves. I’m currently working outside my day job to unite our stories together as a single voice of defiance and recognition. You aren't alone. It can change from Social Media to Delusionary Visionaries in AI trying to create their own gods. 

It's the same human cost for the dark patterns. Not recognising workers' hazards. My story is neither special nor unique as thousands of us around the globe have similar stories. There is life after the algorithm. But to change it we have to stand together. It's almost a sick irony that an Irish American who studied Multi Media and Digital Marketing would end up one of the many people who would try to get some accountability from the Platform. Not a single country has made necessary changes to help people put in these positions. Whether it is Teleperformance, Genopact, TaskUs, CPL... It is shocking that when a new technology is made there have always been loopholes to allow people getting stuck in high trauma roles under office admin, SaaS, AI, compliance titles without safety. The role after so many years affects me like others. I wish I could get my peace of mind back. It’s affected a lot of my relationships with family and friends and day to day life. But I’m using my trauma and experience to help others. The companies can try to dismiss a single story but all of our stories together say the same message. I’m just an IT worker trying to build a career like many others with our own stories to tell. 

We were or are pivotal and Frontline employees when we are needed.

Strangers, Unskilled and overdramatic when we need to be forgotten.

Terminologies 

SRT System - The system used for content moderation workflows, including decisions to delete, censor, or ignore content. Each section had its own subsections and rules.

QA (Quality Analyst) - An auditor who reviewed and graded a small percentage of a moderator's tickets each day to measure performance and accuracy.

Average Quality - A performance metric tracking moderation accuracy, usually expected to be around 95–98%.

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) - The vendor is the official employer, but the client often provides the building, workflow, tools, and monitoring systems.

Boer - A white South African of Afrikaner descent.

Tagalog - A major language spoken in the Philippines and the basis of the Filipino national language.

UKIA - United Kingdom and Ireland market operations. Content for this market generally had to be reviewed and reported from that region and in English.

6-Month Cooling Period - A restriction in some vendor agreements where workers who supported a client through a contractor could not immediately apply for certain roles with that client after leaving.

Multi-Party Litigation - A legal process where multiple individual claims are brought together and share evidence gathering and discovery while remaining separate cases.

Sin Eaters - An informal term sometimes used for content moderators because they are exposed to harmful or disturbing material on behalf of others.

Ghost Workers - Workers whose labor is largely unseen by the public despite being essential to the operation of digital platforms, such as content moderators and data-processing staff.

Bibliography

Facing disturbing content daily, online moderators in Africa want better protections and a fair wage | CBC Radio 

Content moderation is what a 21st century hazardous job looks like - Equal Times Facebook moderators on the things they can't unsee 

The Cleaners | Digital Cleaners Censoring Your Feed | Independent Lens | PBS Facebook moderators break their NDAs to expose desperate working conditions | The Verge Facebook Is Ignoring Moderators’ Trauma: ‘They Suggest Karaoke and Painting’ Watch Facebook Moderators Speak Out About Poor Working Conditions In Ireland How Facebook Trains Content Moderators 

Man exposes traumatic experience as a Facebook moderator – which left him with PTSD | indy100 

‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian 

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America | The Verge 

Facebook moderator: ‘Whenever I talk about the content, I just get more upset’ – The Irish Times 

Meta plans to increase use of AI systems for moderation 

Facebook content moderators cannot sue for psychological injuries in Ireland, court rules – The Irish Times 

New guidance on workplace exposure to sensitive content | Irish Legal News Facebook executives apologise for moderation issues 

Media body won’t disclose interactions with ex-Israeli spy 

Irish content moderators prepare lawsuit against Facebook and CPL 

Bestiality, Stabbings, and Child Porn: Why Facebook Moderators Are Suing the Company for Trauma 

Mark Zuckerberg Calls Negative Facebook Moderator Reports Overdramatic - Business Insider The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED