Welcome back to between Bell's former content moderator Candy
Frasier is suing Tiktok and its parent company Bytedance.
According to a lawsuit filed against the popular social media
app fraser was exposed to endless videos of cannibalism,
school shootings and suicides.
That's just to name a few.
And due to the sheer volume of Tiktok's moderators work at such a frantic pace,
reportedly watching hundreds of videos per 12 hour shift with
only an hour off for lunch and 2 15 minute breaks
joining us now discusses David Walsh editor in chief at this moto.
David, Welcome to the show. Hope you had a great holiday weekend first.
Can you help us understand what exactly a moderator a Tiktok does.
So a moderator at Tiktok are really at any big social media site.
What they do is try to keep the most
vile and disgusting stuff that the internet can produce
off of those networks so that the actual users
don't end up seeing that stuff by accident.
These are all networks that are driven by user submitted content.
So that means that a bad actor can find something
truly vile and submit it anyway,
they want and moderators have to be there to keep that from going out
onto the feed and from lots of people seeing it with that wanted.
So according to Frazier's lawyers,
content moderators are permitted to no more than 25
seconds per video and simultaneously viewing 3 to 10 videos
at the same time.
So potentially of all this graphic content that
you just meant that you just mentioned,
David
does Frasier have a case here?
Yeah, I mean, it's
people need to really understand that.
This isn't just like, oh,
I'm on a computer and I'm watching one video at a time and you know,
it's a barney video and there's nothing in it.
So it's okay and I pass it along.
No, they're watching videos that have already been flagged.
They could have dozens of them on the screen in front of them at any given time.
And these are the most vile, disgusting stuff, violence, pornography, all sorts of
Terrible things.
Now, the laws say that if you're a content moderator like that,
you're supposed to be given breaks,
you're supposed to be given a chance to step away from, you know,
the worst that humanity has to offer and kind of recover from that.
But these people are being forced to work 12 hours a shift.
And if they step away from the computers from a second,
they're getting dinged for it. So I'm not a lawyer.
But it certainly sounds like that they're violating the rules for this.
Tiktok responded by saying, we usually don't comment on litigation,
but said this quote,
we promote a caring working environment for our employees and contractors.
So how does Tiktok address this lawsuit to make real
change for moderators now and after you broke it down,
you're right, they really are looking at the worst from humanity.
So how does Tiktok handle this when it comes to their moderators?
Well, it's tough. I mean, one way to handle this is to actually
actively manage and take care of your moderators?
Part of the problem here is that this moderator
is not employed by Tiktok or by bytedance,
the company that owns them.
This is a moderator that works for a contractor.
A lot of times,
the big social media companies don't hire their own moderators because this way,
you know, they can get somebody sort of off the books.
You know, this moderator seems to have been in California,
but the other companies will use people overseas and just like
in big factories and palm off the work somewhere else,
but also allows them to maybe not be
subject to the same labor laws.
So I would say the first thing that Tiktok
could do is hire their own moderators in house,
have them working at Tiktok somewhere, make sure because they're your employees,
that you're taking care of them, that they're getting their brakes,
that they're getting psychological counseling.
I mean that stuff that's necessary to, I mean,
this is like having a a sports medicine doctor for a football team.
You need to have a psychiatrist or a therapist to help these people when
they've gone through a day's work to that point according to the complaint.
Other social media companies like facebook and
youtube have developed guidelines for helping their
moderators cope with this with viewing this
content again according to the complaint,
Tiktok has failed to implement these guidelines.
So what is fraser hoping to get out of this lawsuit, David?
Well,
I think for one thing she's probably hoping for for some sort of monetary reward.
She's gone through a lot. It's probably scarred her. So there's that.
But what she's also looking at is, you know, there have been other class actions,
there was a class action like this against Facebook and in 2018
Facebook ended up paying out more than 50 million to its moderators.
So it wasn't taken care of.
I imagine that this is the same scenario that these are, you know,
this this lawsuit will probably be joined by other moderators and it'll
be people looking for some relief and looking for the company,
not only to
compensate them for what they've been through,
but to correct their behavior in the future so
that other people don't have to go through this.
So you think more lawsuits are coming,
Do you think this could become a bigger deal if it is
proven that Tiktok really didn't implement
these guidelines to protect their moderators?
Yeah, I think this is gonna be a big deal.
I think we're gonna see more of these and I think it it becomes
a bigger and bigger problem as networks like Tiktok just get bigger and bigger.
We've already seen this on some of the other platforms.
Tiktok is obviously super huge.
Now,
the problem isn't going to go away as long as
we are driving these websites on user submitted content,
the companies behind them either need to come up
with a better way to filter or they need to
hire some editors and create their own original content so that
people don't have the chance to submit this horrific stuff.
David, the Walls editor in chief at Gizmodo David. We hope you come back.
This is not going anywhere and Happy New Year, my friend.