Never let it be said that modern despair and awfulness aren’t a powerful job creator, as Facebook announced today that it plans to hire 3,000 new employees to its community operations team for the sole purpose of monitoring videos to filter out acts of violence and other harmful, vile shit.
The social network has been plagued in recent months by people using its Facebook Live service to broadcast violent acts, including multiple murders and suicides. Given that letting its users transform the video streaming service into the web’s most easily accessible snuff film site doesn’t match Facebook’s “social media for the whole family” image, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will soon be hiring 3,000 more employees, nearly doubling its staff of content reviewers.
Zuckerberg didn’t say where these jobs would be located, although it seems likely that many of them will be in the Philippines, where thousands of people already work sub-minimum wage jobs for companies like Google, Microsoft, and more, filtering through the worst impulses our species has to offer. Wired did a write-up of the industry back in 2014, charting the effects that working an eight-hour shift sifting through beheadings, animal abuse, and child pornography can have on the human mind. (The report notes that PTSD is a common, even normal reaction to the stream of depravity and filth that is humanity unmoderated.)
Facebook’s new employees will presumably be doing something similar, tasked with responding to the “millions” of reports of objectionable posts the company receives every day. Zuckerberg also pledged to continue working with law enforcement and community groups in order to prevent people using Facebook to threaten to harm themselves or others from carrying out their intents.