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The Terror Queue: These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD
By: The Verge | December 1, 2019

Google and YouTube approach content moderation the same way all of the other tech giants do: paying a handful of other companies to do most of the work. One of those companies, Accenture, operates Google’s largest content moderation site in the United States: an office in Austin, Texas, where content moderators work around the clock cleaning up YouTube.

Peter is one of hundreds of moderators at the Austin site. YouTube sorts the work for him and his colleagues into various queues, which the company says allows moderators to build expertise around its policies. There’s a copyright queue, a hate and harassment queue, and an “adult” queue for porn.

Peter works what is known internally as the “VE queue,” which stands for violent extremism. It is some of the grimmest work to be done at Alphabet. And like all content moderation jobs that involve daily exposure to violence and abuse, it has had serious and long-lasting consequences for the people doing the work.

In the past year, Peter has seen one of his co-workers collapse at work in distress, so burdened by the videos he had seen that he took two months of unpaid leave from work. Another co-worker, wracked with anxiety and depression caused by the job, neglected his diet so badly that he had to be hospitalized for an acute vitamin deficiency.

Peter, who has done this job for nearly two years, worries about the toll that the job is taking on his mental health. His family has repeatedly urged him to quit. But he worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does: $18.50 an hour, or about $37,000 a year.

Since he began working in the violent extremism queue, Peter noted, he has lost hair and gained weight. His temper is shorter. When he drives by the building where he works, even on his off days, a vein begins to throb in his chest.

“Every day you watch someone beheading someone, or someone shooting his girlfriend,” Peter tells me. “After that, you feel like wow, this world is really crazy. This makes you feel ill. You’re feeling there is nothing worth living for. Why are we doing this to each other?”

Like many of his co-workers working in the VE queue in Austin, Peter is an immigrant. Accenture recruited dozens of Arabic speakers like him, many of whom grew up in the Middle East. The company depends on his language skills — he speaks seven — to accurately identify hate speech and terrorist propaganda and remove it from YouTube.

Several workers I spoke with are hoping to become citizens, a feat that has only grown more difficult under the Trump administration. They worry about speaking out — to a manager, to a journalist — for fear it will complicate their immigration efforts. (For this reason, I agreed to use pseudonyms for most of the workers in this story.)

More than that, though, Peter and other moderators in Austin told me they wanted to live like the full-time Google employees who sometimes visit his office. A higher wage, better health benefits, and more caring managers would alleviate the burdens of the job, they told me.

“We see the people coming from there, how they are, how they are acting more free,” Peter tells me.

For most of this year, I thought the same thing Peter did. Bring the moderators in house, pay them as you would pay a police officer or firefighter, and perhaps you could reduce the mental health toll of constant exposure to graphic violence.

Then I met a woman who had worked as a content moderator for Google itself. She earned a good salary, nearing the six-figure mark. There were excellent health benefits and other perks. But none of these privileges would ultimately prevent the disturbing content she saw each day from harming her.

After a year of removing terrorism and child abuse from Google’s services, she suffered from anxiety and frequent panic attacks. She had trouble interacting with children without crying. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

She still struggles with it today...

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