"Former TikTok moderators sue over emotional toll of 'extremely disturbing' videos", 24 Mar. 2022

[Two] former TikTok moderator[s]...have filed a federal lawsuit seeking class action status against the video-sharing app and its parent company, ByteDance.

Their lawsuit accuses TikTok of negligence and says it broke California labor laws by allegedly not protecting [moderators] from the emotional trauma caused by reviewing hundreds of "highly toxic and extremely disturbing"...

[Allegedly] TikTok did not provide adequate mental health treatment to help deal with the anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress associated with reviewing graphic videos.

[The moderators were] contractors, not employees of TikTok...The suit says TikTok and ByteDance controlled the day-to-day work...by directly tying their pay to how well they moderated content in TikTok's system and by pushing them to hit aggressive quota targets...moderators had to sign non-disclosure agreements...

[They] were allowed two 15-minute breaks and a lunch hour over a 12-hour workday. If they took any other breaks, they risked losing pay, the suit says...

A TikTok spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit but said the company "strives to promote a caring working environment for our employees and contractors.”... [and that moderators are] offered "a range of wellness services so that moderators feel supported mentally and emotionally."

[One moderator] set up a meeting with a...counselor, who [only] spoke to her for 30 minutes...

"There's a hope that artificial intelligence can do all of this work, but that hope is not yet realized, so now humans mostly do this work,"...

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has developed best practices for content moderators who are exposed to images and videos of exploited minors...

The suit says that although TikTok is one of the center's corporate partners, along with Google and Facebook, it has not adopted the group's recommendations, instead focusing on hitting video-review quotas above all else...