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Guardian

Guardian

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Health

PTSD, depression and anxiety: why former Facebook moderators in Kenya are taking legal action

Guardian
Summary
Nutrition label

63% Informative

144 people were diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder after moderating horrific content for Facebook.

One of the 144 people diagnosed with PTSD was one of hundreds of young Africans who worked from 2019 to 2023 at an outsourcing company, Samasource , used by Facebook’s owner Meta to protect its hundreds of millions of users from the worst of the torrent of images and video being uploaded to the social media platform every minute .

Meta and Samasource provided wellness counsellors, but they were not medical doctors.

Requests for psychiatric care under employee medical insurance were ignored’, claim alleges.

Some became desensitised to sexual urges and were repulsed by their own sexual partners.

Ethiopians tasked with handling content from their home country were targeted by one of the warring parties.

VR Score

68

Informative language

69

Neutral language

40

Article tone

informal

Language

English

Language complexity

54

Offensive language

likely offensive

Hate speech

not hateful

Attention-grabbing headline

not detected

Known propaganda techniques

not detected

Time-value

short-lived

External references

no external sources

Source diversity

no sources

Affiliate links

no affiliate links