The distinction between content moderation and other sorts of "unskilled office work" is the distressing nature of the content. My gut feeling is that these are

The distinction between content moderation and other sorts of "unskilled office work" is the distressing nature of the content. My gut feeling is that these aren't "handpicked horror stories" but are instead the core of the job: facing video evidence of the worst aspects of human cruelty for 8 hours a day. Thus, the question raised isn't a simple "shouldn't these employees be treated better?" but something more like "how can we accept the existence of a job like this?" In my personal opinion, as someone who's moderated online communities before, Facebook needs to accept that any "system of [ethical] rules" is prone to being "lawyered", and ultimately serves to waste the time of content moderators like these. More importantly, few accept such a system of rules as legitimate: any rule set, even if "fair", is going to be judged by its edge cases, e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens... The answer is to deploy an aggressive moderation AI, and tell users "too damn bad" if their post gets deleted (users will protest about "free speech" but that philosophical principle was created in a very different communication environment. If I had to create a new right more suited to the modern day, it'd be a right to "freedom from speech" instead), or else dramatically limit the sphere of content users are exposed to (although that would go against their whole ethos "connecting the world" or whatever).