Facebook on Monday announced that it will increase wages and offer more counseling to its thousands of content moderators in the U.S., most of whom are contract workers who have complained of unfair working conditions.
The embattled tech giant in a blog post said it is rolling out the reforms after hearing from content moderators and heeding advice from psychologists on its “global resiliency team.”
{mosads}Facebook said it will pay at least $22 per hour to content moderators in the San Francisco area, New York City and Washington, D.C.; $20 per hour to content moderators in Seattle; and $18 per hour for those in all other U.S. metro areas.
It is also adding “preferences” that allow content moderators to customize how they see certain content — for example, they will now be allowed to blur out graphic images by default before reviewing them.
“We made these changes after hearing feedback that reviewers want more control over how they see content that can be challenging,” Janelle Gale, Facebook’s vice president of scaled operations, said in the post.
The company will also require Facebook’s content moderators to have access to counselors on-site at all hours, rather than during certain parts of their shifts.
Facebook content reviewers for months have raised concerns over the company’s treatment of its contract workers, particularly those tasked with reviewing the graphic, violent or sexually explicit content flagged for review.
According to The Washington Post, a group of content moderators this year launched an internal protest over their working conditions, deriding what they said was relatively low pay and paltry counseling services for those performing one of Facebook’s most psychologically taxing jobs.
Most Facebook content reviewers are third-party contractors, meaning they do not get the same benefits or wages as full-time company employees.
The Verge earlier this year interviewed a dozen current and former Facebook content reviewers in Phoenix who described oppressive working conditions and the immense emotional toll of reviewing disturbing footage for one of the largest social networking websites in the world. The workers said many of Facebook’s thousands of content reviewers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Content reviewers are asked to look through hundreds of posts per day, including images and videos of graphic violence, sexual exploitation, hate speech and harassment, in order to flag and take down posts that violate Facebook’s complex guidelines.
Facebook has brought on thousands of reviewers in the past several years amid criticism that it is not doing enough to remove exploitative and harmful content.
The company described the changes announced on Monday as “the first of many new programs and tools” geared toward improving conditions for those workers.
The blog post notes that Facebook is working to create similar standards that would apply internationally.
Facebook is also increasing minimum wage for contract workers — such as janitors and cafeteria workers — to $20 per hour in San Francisco, New York City and Washington, D.C., and $18 in Seattle. The increase comes after Facebook in 2015 increased its minimum wage for contract workers to $15 per hour.
“In the years since, it’s become clear that $15 per hour doesn’t meet the cost of living in some of the places where we operate,” Gale wrote.
“For workers in the US that review content on Facebook, we are raising wages even more,” she noted. “Their work is critical to keeping our community safe, and it’s often difficult.”