Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions

This was a valuable article to read.<p>Facebook is enormously valuable. They made something like $15B in net income in the last four quarters.<p>Content moderators are a necessary condition for that profit. If kiddie porn, gore and animal cruelty flooded the network, it would cease to be a destination visited by people that advertisers will pay to reach.<p>And yet, there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook: engineers ($150k&#x2F;year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and content moderators ($30k&#x2F;year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses).<p>I understand the arguments about supply and demand of labour, but I&#x27;d have more respect for Facebook if they demonstrated awareness of this issue. The article talks about moderators re-evaluating the same piece of distressing content that they&#x27;ve already flagged. Why? I suspect because the moderator is cheap, and so Facebook isn&#x27;t putting in the effort to ensure that every judgment needs to be made the minimum number of times.<p>More so than salary, I suspect Facebook considers the moderator cheap in terms of reputation risk. By outsourcing to contractors located offsite from main campus, engineers aren&#x27;t thinking daily about the absolutely horrible stuff moderators are seeing, and so the one group doesn&#x27;t impact Facebook&#x27;s ability to hire engineers. This is a guess - can anyone at Facebook speak to whether engineers are aware of the working conditions of moderators, and agitate to improve their lot?

Guy Rosen and other execs within Integrity team continually skirt their responsibilities here. They claim they&#x27;re doing better, but the second-order effects of crappy work conditions and demands keep cropping up. Zuck says one day we will hopefully be able to AI-away this integrity work (especially the most traumatizing), but he does not say a whisper as to improving working conditions or pay while the work needs to be done by humans. And I bet Zuck wouldn&#x27;t be able to handle the content that these people have to view. Sheryl does not care. She keeps referencing the same standard schpiel about how contracting companies have to abide by a strict set of standards, and how they&#x27;re ahead of the market in terms of pay and wellbeing. But it&#x27;s still awful. The divide between contractors and full-time workers at Facebook is truly disgusting.<p>People who work at Facebook should be pushing for change. But they&#x27;re numb to the schpiel. They&#x27;re cushy and looked after and don&#x27;t want to create a fuss.<p>Rosen doesn&#x27;t care. Zuck doesn&#x27;t care. Sheryl doesn&#x27;t care. What DO they care about? Perception. Sit in any high-up integrity meeting and you&#x27;ll see the only thing they seem to talk about is how &quot;x&quot; would be received by users at scale. There&#x27;s no comment as to the ethics or corporate responsibility. You can be talking about something pretty out there like how human rights intersect with takedown decisions and all you&#x27;ve got is a bunch of people umming-and-ahhing about lossy metrics and how Zuck wants this or that so we better hurry up. Or how awwesome it&#x27;ll look on our PSCs if we ship this thing.<p>Broken company.

&quot;<i>Conditions at the Phoenix site have not improved significantly since I visited. Last week, some employees were sent home after an infestation of bed bugs was discovered in the office — the second time bed bugs have been found there this year. Employees who contacted me worried that the infestation would spread to their own homes, and said managers told them Cognizant would not pay to clean their homes.</i>&quot;<p>This is utterly nightmarish, given how costly to one&#x27;s life bedbugs are. (clearing out a home, including the replacing of all mattesses&#x2F;couches, and bagging or hot-cleaning all clothing, sheets, towels, rugs...)<p><i>&quot;A manager saw that she was not feeling well, and brought a trash can to her desk so she could vomit in it. So she did.&quot;</i><p>This particular manager put their employees in danger of catching illness, especially given what appears to be the open office floorplan where airborne sicknesses can travel the entire room. I&#x27;m shocked and apalled, and this is <i>the stuff I&#x27;m comfortable quoting from the article</i> to be shocked and apalled by. The other stuff has convinced me to help inform friends and family to get off facebook rather than passively clean myself of it only.

I think the most pertinent question is <i>why don&#x27;t they quit</i>?<p>It says a great deal about how broken the United States&#x27; job market and social safety net are. If minimum wage were $15, they could find another job that paid their basic living expenses. If health care weren&#x27;t left up to your employer, they wouldn&#x27;t be out of luck while looking for a different job. If there were <i>any alternative</i>, they wouldn&#x27;t stay in this hellscape.<p><i>They stay because this is the best deal they could find.</i> Think about the kind of society that makes that the case.

I am surprised after reading a lot of comments here (not all), that I have not seen any discussion of Cognizant and their role. I am no fan of Facebook and I believe that they have significant responsibility here, but the contractor is, imo, the party directly responsible.<p>These people do not work for Facebook, and we don&#x27;t know the nature of the contract in play. Are they paying per person, or a lump sum for some capacity at some accuracy rate. If Cognizant automated all of this would it be accepted under the contract?<p>Anyways, I don&#x27;t want to shift focus away from Facebook so much as wanting to recognize the contracted call mpanies like Cognizant (which is what the whole article is about btw, with some comments referring to Facebook). Accenture and Cognizant really shouldn&#x27;t escape the scrutiny just for being overshadowed by a bigger name.

Just a warning - I found even a short description of some of the videos they had to watch fairly disturbing.<p>I don&#x27;t think I could do that job for very long - let alone in a badly run, high pressure environment with low wages.

Maybe Facebook should make all of their own employees do 15 minutes of moderation per day - just to share the pain out a bit....

Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content.<p>Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it.<p>Can&#x27;t kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we&#x27;ll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn&#x27;t exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes.<p>Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective, insatiable gaping maw.

If they made engineers take turns working in the content moderation you would soon see all sorts of improvements (like the aforementioned ability to recognize duplicate content for starters).<p>They would hate it so much, that would make better tooling. But now they don&#x27;t have to know about it, just send images to the moderation team over and over like they are robots.

There were many reasons that led to me deleting my Facebook account in May, 2018. The fact that the platform is a magnet for the absolute worst of humanity and then employs and exploits people in such an inhumane and cavalier way to filter the garbage out was high on the list. Get Zuckerberg to do the job for a few hours and see what he thinks.

So ... we all need to start flagging beautiful nature scenes, humorous comics, lists of health tips, and job postings for less stressful jobs that you could do if you&#x27;re already qualified for being a facebook moderator?<p>At least that way they get a bit of a break from all the other horrible stuff.

I think this is also a symptom of the US’ shocking attitude to worker’s rights.<p>The article says staff were constantly reminded of how easily replaced they were, which is a euphemism for “you’re lucky we gave you a job.”<p>Facebook and Cognizant are majorly dropping the ball but US government and legislation strongly enables that. As do individual states.<p>From a European perspective this is a sad article to read about work conditions in “the greatest nation in the world.”

Social Media Content Moderation Team Lead<p>Cognizant Technology Solutions<p>Tampa, Florida • This is an exempt position, requiring day, evening, weekend, and holiday shifts, as this delivery center is operational 24&#x2F;7 and 365 days a year.<p>Cognizant is seeking a team of strong Team Leads to manage a team of social media content moderators for a global social media organization.<p>The Team Lead will be responsible not only for managing day to day operations of the team, people management, performance management, but also help the client determine gaps in processes, identifying innovative ways to solve problems upstream and scale our operations.<p>Ideal candidates will be comfortable understanding social media, have an appetite for research and gathering data insights, a high level of comfort working with cross-functional partners, and a strong analytical mindset. Successful team members have a passion for business success, strong attention to detail, analytical problem-solving abilities keeping a high level of team motivation and keen eyes for operational inefficiencies.<p>Responsibilities: • Provide mentorship, guidance and career development to members of your team • Lead a high-performing team through an exciting transition to build problem solving, critical thinking, analytical and technical capabilities which will enable the department to develop deeper, more scalable solutions • Team management responsibilities for a market team, whilst also serving as a cross-functional and a global liaison in developed areas of expertise • Establish team goals and work with direct reports on strategies for executing, measuring progress and sharing results • Deliver projects involving quantitative analysis, industry research, and strategy development, working directly with global cross-functional teams to problem solve analytical approaches and develop solutions • Identify actionable insights, suggest recommendations, and influence team strategy through effective communication • Advocate for users within their market, partnering with global and cross-functional teams to develop global solutions

I have a hotkey in i3wm:<p>bindsym $mod+backslash exec &quot;xcalib -i -a&quot;<p>which inverts all colors (btw, I have to `killall redshift` because of a bug). When colors are inverted, I feel almost undisturbed at any gruesome content (for me it&#x27;s like seeing screenshots of Quake 2 with buggy GPU drivers), yet I can still easily recognise whether the content is disturbing. And when it&#x27;s a video, I play it at ≥2x speed so that it wouldn&#x27;t feel realistic for my brain.<p>I wonder whether those moderators use these two lifehacks.

From the article, we don&#x27;t know how much a moderator &quot;can take&quot; daily. Perhaps studies haven&#x27;t been done. Perhaps it&#x27;s too complicated a subject for good tests. But, they could check with organizations who have experience already with employees having to watch horrific crimes.<p>The chief information security officer in my organization came from our state police where he headed the internet crimes against children division. People on his team had to watch videos like the ones described in the article. Despite having all hardened officers on his team, team members regularly cried at their desks while watching videos. His team members had to be taken off-duty for weeks every six months to recover. They had mandatory counseling even when off-duty.<p>I would think FB and other large companies could look at the measures taken by police forces with similarly disturbing jobs as a guideline for the contractors.

Yet another case where NDAs are abused to cover-up corporate misdeeds. I think their enforcability should be <i>severely</i> restricted. With penalties if a lawyer includes them in a contract, despite knowing they are invalid, so invalid terms can&#x27;t be used to scare workers not familiar with the law.

“But had his managers asked, they would have learned that Speagle had a history of anxiety and depression“<p>Should employers really be asking about mental health history during the hiring process?

&gt; But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue (..) They kept reposting it again and again and again.<p>Seems like it should be pretty &quot;easy&quot; to spot similar videos and audio (even after some modifications) given how great dataset all those moderators are providing.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure there are some pretty smart folks working at fb, so it would mean that given accuracy standards it&#x27;s still cheaper for them to hire humans to do the job.

Couldn&#x27;t violence (both towards animals and humans) be detected in an automated fashion?<p>Especially screams in the audio should be fairly easy to find.<p>Then block those videos by default, with a manual appeals process that sends it to a moderator, combined with a big warning that submitting videos against the TOS will get you suspended. Of course this could lead to people submitting videos without audio, but this will always be a cat and mouse game.<p>Or is FB under legal duty to review potentially criminal content?

&gt; Nobody’s prepared to see a little girl have her organs taken out while she’s still alive and screaming.<p>On the one hand, of course you don&#x27;t want to see this and of course you want it removed from your social media feed.<p>On the other hand, if it&#x27;s hidden, it horrifies fewer people, and instead of rising social pressure to take action against it, it can fester in the dark.<p>So if we manage to replace a significant chunk of centralized, moderated social media with decentralized, unmoderated alternatives, many of us will be exposed to more of this kind of evil. But as a result more of us will be aware of it and motivated to fight it.<p>I&#x27;d rather participate in unmoderated media, even at a greater risk of being assaulted by this kind of crap. But at this extreme I can sympathize with those that want straight up censorship, even if sunlight is a better long term disinfectant.

<i>I asked him what he thought needed to change.<p>“I think Facebook needs to shut down,” he said.</i>

This seems to be the place<p>Cognizant Technology Solutions Woodlands2 7725 Woodland Center Blvd, Tampa, FL 33614<p>There&#x27;s another big story here, it may get more horrific, from browsing their phone directory most of their &quot;employees&quot; appear to be people of south Asian nationality. Given the circumstances and their predatory behavior, I imagine they are also taking advantage of H1Bs.

The issue is not as much Cognizant or FB as it is the state of the public. The horrible acts posted online for entertainment by the public is the reason for companies like Cognizant. I hope these posts can forwarded to local law enforcement and the posts used as evidence against the poster.

I would have thought they would have the best filtering AI and dataset the world has to offer, to avoid having those moderators to work like this.

I feel that we&#x27;re going to view these places and these practices the same way we view children in coal mines or young women working with radium paint. I&#x27;ve got a feeling that though we know very little about this now, our children and grandchildren are going to know a lot about this.<p>Dear Lord, what a horrible thing.

There seems to be a very distinct difference between employee classes. Management and high value tech employees are treated very well while moderators, gig workers etc are treated as &quot;human resources&quot;, quite literally.<p>It seems to me that they put companies like Cognizant between them and the exploited workers to deflect criticism as &quot;we didn&#x27;t know, we&#x27;ve been told by our partners that everything is great&quot;.<p>And on a technical level: if true, how can it be that FB needs the same videos and pictures to be moderated over and over? Are they not using any form of content id? Is developing such a system more expensive than running content moderation sites and then swiftly firing the burnt out moderators?<p>At what point do you become complicit if you&#x27;re working for Facebook?

I&#x27;ve worked some shit jobs over the years an I can&#x27;t say I wouldn&#x27;t be very tempted to try working there for $15&#x2F;hr if I was still in the market for that kind of job and everything else around is paying closer to $9. I know HN likes to grandstand about how important workplace conditions are but when you&#x27;re doing unskilled jobs you don&#x27;t have that luxury. If you get the opportunity to do a worse job for 66% more money you take it and try to do it well enough to keep cashing that check.<p>I know that a lot of people here are probably bothered by the fact that the workplace sounds like impersonal zoo but most of these minimum wage workplaces are along that spectrum. Dirty bathrooms, inflexible policies for everything, etc. are normal. It&#x27;s just how workplaces like this are. If you want a shitty job that&#x27;s more personal and flexible then you need to work for a small employer but that can have its downsides too.<p>Sure the content itself sucks particularly but that&#x27;s why they pay bigger bucks than everyone else if you can cope then good for you. If you can&#x27;t you leave. It&#x27;s just like a call center but more extreme.<p>Don&#x27;t mistake me as defending Facebook or Cognizant here, I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m just saying this that all things considered this doesn&#x27;t seem like a particularly bad deal as far a shitty unskilled jobs go. They all have their pros and cons and you gotta find something that works for your personal preferences. I&#x27;d take digging ditches over anything with rigid corporate policy about every facet of my job but that&#x27;s just my preference.<p>Personally something I think would help a lot would be if they&#x27;d over-staff the place and schedule people for few enough hours that they can easily hold another job and make efforts to accommodate people&#x27;s other commitments. Just doing content moderation every day is probably where a lot of the mental and physical health issues comes from. In my experience the kinds of jobs that really grind you down grind you down a lot less when they&#x27;re your side gig to some other slightly less shit job.

Facebook really doesn’t need to exist.

Dear Facebook Employees and Zuckerberg: More than the other megas, you claim moral highground. You have a passion culture where people `actually believe` they are doing something great. To this day, even with the retarded masses and corrupt congress thinking something is wrong, you `still believe` this. So where the fruit of your labor. Where has the blessings of your existence improved the lives of the unfortunate? where? where? im asking you right now reading this looking into your eyes. where?<p>well we&#x27;ve heard the line that the tech isn&#x27;t there yet. or how you have learned from past attempts to help and are taking more targeted approaches.<p>ok, that works for the retarded masses and corrupt congress.<p>but I call bullshit. its actually more than that, its malicious intentional lying.<p>you know how you can help? heres a really easy way. take some of your money, give it to these slave&#x2F;content-moderators.<p>100,000 to you is not 100,000 to them.<p>how much would you need to pay me to watch that shit? zuck man, you can&#x27;t give me your salary to watch that. that shit damages you for life. and you think its worth whatever?<p>yall walk around (figuratively, on the internet) like you have something to be proud of. donald abraham is confident as shit.<p>but you know, yall are just like any other mega. sure each mega has its own demographic. but the entire reason for the existance of a mega ensures 100% you will engage in unethical behavior. and you will recreate the extremely oppressive society we live in everyday. Furthermore, you will recreate the belief in the opposite: things aren&#x27;t so bad and we `good peoples`

&quot;He watched videos of people playing with human fetuses, and says he learned that they are allowed on Facebook “as long as the skin is translucent.”<p>Wow. Just Wow.

“I think Facebook needs to shut down.&quot;<p>As I&#x27;ve spent the last few years pissing away absurd amounts of time on the platform, gotten in countless fruitless arguments, and seen the truly vile and toxic elements of my communities exposed and worn like a badge, this is an idea I&#x27;ve been thinking an awful lot about. After reading this article, I&#x27;ve never been more certain of that statement.

Basically, you get paid $15 an hour to poison your subconscious mind.<p>Absolutely unethical. Facebook should not be allowed to hide behind subcontractors.

The article mentioned that &quot;In May, Facebook announced that it will raise contractor wages by $3 an hour&quot;. If Facebook is dictating the wages of content moderators, then it is an employer, and all of these &quot;contractors&quot; should be reclassified as such, with Facebook paying all back wages, benefits, etc.<p>Here are some other ideas:<p>Instead of having content moderators watch 200 of these videos per day, distribute the load over the entire Facebook workforce. Or, when a content moderator flags a video for removal, verify that by making a regular Facebook employee watch the video to confirm the removal. This should increase the accuracy rate above the 98% threshold Facebook has set. That should put a finer point on the problem.<p>I could barely read descriptions of these videos. There&#x27;s no way I could watch one, let alone 200 a day. This work is like being in a war, and they should be paid like a soldier who is risking their life &#x2F; mental health.

800 workers, 1 bathroom. Really?

All this content reprograms our brain. Even if a sane person works for FB for content moderation they will be screwed up pretty soon.<p>I am so glad i am not on facebook since 2008. If you think it&#x27;s not messing with you, THINK AGAIN. Facebook is the worst thing that happened to us, except for Mark and it&#x27;s employees

This is done for Youtube as well btw. Not a FB only problem.

Don&#x27;t fret, FB mods. You&#x27;ll soon be replaced by algorithms so you won&#x27;t have to do this much longer. You know, by those people making a min of 4x what you do and look down upon you. They&#x27;ll tell ya to learn to code as they chuckle under their breath.

&gt; Florida law does not require employers to offer sick leave, and so Cognizant workers who feel ill must instead use personal leave time.<p>It seems that Facebook and Cognizant are not the only ones completely failing at protecting their people (employees, contractors, citizens).

Where are the organ harvesting videos coming from, I wonder? Anyone have any thoughts on that?

This might be an opportunity for facebook to do a lot of real good for the world.<p>They should have an investigative unit that tracks down the source of this material and partners with law enforcement so we can catch the bastards doing and posting this horrible stuff.

They should pay users small amounts of Libra for accurately moderating content. It completely solves the problem and they get to pay their new, more willing, contractors in what basically amounts to monopoly money (in the near term at least).

I&#x27;m sure such scale requires heavy moderation. It pains me to realize the cost of enjoying the benefits of social media - if any, at all - that it makes me wonder whether we should have it in the first place at all.<p>I can imagine a world without Facebook.

I live in East Wall, Dublin -- beside the Facebook moderator (The Beckett) building.<p>I wonder if this is true for them as well or if it&#x27;s just N. America -- we&#x27;ve better employment protections and minimum wage in Ireland compared to the US.

I read the bit about the children having their organs harvested while alive and didn’t believe it so I did some googling and now I’m done for the day. I’m gonna go hug my kids.

How much of this originates with FB&#x2F;Cognizant? This seems mostly characteristic of other low-paying job work environments. You&#x27;re not going to get the cultural elite paying $15&#x2F;hour. You get desperate people with patterns of maladaptive behavior and dysfunctions. You get horseplay, various illnesses that come from bad home environments, and overall balls of stress that are just looking for a job, any job.

Would be interested in seeing some kind of legislation where content moderation jobs that deal with XYZ categories of content must be compensate at least some % downtime&#x2F;recovery. So e.g. in an 8 hour day you can only spend 4 hours a day doing moderation, and 4 hours of &#x27;paid mental preparation&#x27; for doing the moderation work.

I imagine if Facebook could use its users to moderate content from others, say you are sign up for moderation, then have to moderate 20 posts from unrelated users to get 20 days of ad free Facebook. Facebook could employ a system like re captcha uses to identify users faking it.<p>Win-win?

Basically you get paid $15 an hour to poison your subconscious mind which is 95% of your life.<p>Absolutely unethical.

&gt;&gt; &quot;Speagle vividly recalls the first video he saw in his new assignment. Two teenagers spot an iguana on the ground, and one picks it up by the tail. A third teenager films what happens next: the teen holding the iguana begins smashing it onto the street. “They beat the living shit out of this thing,” Speagle told me, as tears welled up in his eyes. “The iguana was screaming and crying. And they didn’t stop until the thing was a bloody pulp.”<p>&gt;&gt;&quot;Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook. A manager told him that by leaving the video online, authorities would be able to catch the perpetrators.&quot;<p>Utterly disgusting and inhumane policy on facebook&#x27;s part.<p>Continuing to display abject animal cruelty only lowers the bar for would-be imitators.<p>There have also been shown to be strong links between animal cruelty and human cruelty, including murder.<p>To be clear, the ONLY proper way to handle this is to immediately take it down and file a report with the relevant police agencies. Expecting the local police agencies to maintain the same staff of 30,000 people to monitor FB posts for crime is stupidly absurd.<p>This is at best depraved indifference on FB&#x27;s part, and more likely a deliberate dishonest rationalization to keep posted something extreme that will get lots of &#x27;views&#x27; and &#x27;engagement&#x27;.<p>This is only one of millions of examples, including cooperating with the Russian &#x2F; Cambridge Analytica &#x2F; etc groups to corrupt elections in the US, England, and elsewhere.<p>Simply put, Facebook is deliberately poisoning society for profit, and far worse than any tobacco company ever did.<p>They need to be shut down. Now. There are far better ways to do everything FB claims to do.<p>(edit: add police report paragraph)

Even second hand in article format that’s disturbing.<p>A classic sweatshop operations except it also destroys the slaves psyche on top of it.<p>Two parties weren’t really mentioned. The executives that set up the operation and the people posting the content. Both must be pretty twisted

&gt; Work stopped while we were there to ensure we did not see any Facebook user’s personal information.<p>Do users know that their personal information is being looked through by employees who don&#x27;t work for Facebook?

I haven&#x27;t used Facebook since 2012 so maybe I&#x27;m missing something. When someone posts a video of them torturing a dog under their own name, or some other sick thing, does that not cause some sort of problem with their friends and local community? Many would permanently block and ostracize an acquaintance for such a thing. Why does nobody call the police on someone like that, especially when they know their work&#x2F;address&#x2F;etc in real life?<p>I guess I don&#x27;t understand the key change in the medium or the culture that requires Facebook&#x27;s ponderous rule tome and 10000 anonymous content moderators in Manila or Phoenix. Is this just about the risk of some corporate ad being next to some undesired content for a few page views?

It’s strange how quiet the pro-Facebookers become on threads like these. Yesterday, we saw a lot of energy around Libra on both sides of the Facebook spectrum.<p>I’d love to hear an argument from someone defending this company that isn’t “everybody does it.”

Maybe censoring is not effective?<p>Why not to embrace any content and just make police raids when someone uploads questionable content?<p>Is censorship solves anything?

Where is the Facebook walkout, to demand humane working conditions for everyone at Facebook and its contractors?

Why are the same videos coming up again and again?<p>Of everything, that seems like an easy problem to solve.

I cannot believe they require signing an NDA for this job. You cannot JUST VENT?

I didn’t even realize that they had human mods. Interesting!

NDAs and non-compete agreements should not ever be considered as valid contracts by the government.

sounds like the workers need a union

&gt; there are two sets of entry-level knowledge workers at Facebook:<p>&gt; engineers ($150k&#x2F;year, benefits, upward career trajectory) and<p>&gt; content moderators ($30k&#x2F;year, no benefits, likely going to acquire mental illnesses).<p>If Facebook could get away with paying engineers $30K&#x2F;year, no benefits, believe me, they would.

You ever read Upton Sinclair&#x27;s the jungle? It&#x27;s a tale as old as time. Just publicly shame the company and ultimately they change or congress passes laws. This is a major reason the media works this way, it&#x27;s part of American democracy.

Cognizant is a ‘win at all costs’ major outsourcer. Their entire operations and staff are based in India and they are registered in US to soften the regulatory hurdles. It’s no surprise they didn’t have a defibrillator in the building.

Funny how Zuck and even Bezos have this worker problem coming up all the time.<p>Their making a lot of money, can they not at least make working conditions decent? Too much to ask?

PSA: I watched a video and I got PTSD.<p>I used to casually browse a subreddit called watch people die. In 2016 I watched a video on that subreddit that gave me ptsd. At that point in time I had watched probably hundreds of intensely graphic videos, and the total pieces of intensely violent media I had consumed probably numbered in the thousands. I had been into it since 2008. I did it because of morbid curiosity.<p>At first I scrolled through the comments and noticed something very unusual: very emphatic comments warning people that videos can give you ptsd. Most videos have comments where people talk about how “I couldn’t even finish it” or whatever, so I brushed it off. After watching the video I immediately knew something was wrong. My body felt strange. My mind was in a state of hyper-tension or vigilance. It’s very difficult to describe. I also noticed that my libido would come and go in waves. I would go from not feeling any sexual feelings to being more horny than I’ve ever been in my life. I knew that something deep inside of me had been deeply affected. I went to sleep without much trouble. When I woke up I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I felt something coming over me. A sensation of panic. It surprised me because it was out of the blue and I’ve never felt something like that before. I then entered a full blown panic attack, which rocked me so hard that I fled the bathroom and threw myself on the couch. It passed, but I was drowning in anxiety and a sensation of doom. At this point I knew that I may have permanently fucked myself. I was scared. but I still had to go to work. I spent the next few weeks forcing myself through each workday while being suffocated by an overwhelming sensation of doom, anxiety and panic. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done. But I got through it.<p>I noticed many things that I later learned are indicative of ptsd: having your eyes lock up, feeling ready to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, an intense desire to subdue the anxiety with alcohol and drugs. I would walk down the street like an insane person, ready to rage on anyone who even looked at me wrong, and I had no history of anything like this.<p>I never had bad nightmares or trouble getting to or staying asleep, so I think I had some kind of light beer ptsd. But it was hell on earth. Everything I had heard about veterans losing their jobs and killing themselves all of a sudden made so much sense. Take it from me: ptsd is one of the worst things that can happen to you. And I didn’t even have full blown ptsd.<p>I got help from a few therapists, and they informed me that if my symptoms persisted more than a month or something, I would technically have ptsd. Other than that, the therapists were basically of no help whatsoever. The symptoms lasted well beyond three months.<p>As time went on, the symptoms got better. They seem to have stabilized now. If I’m distracted, I feel normal. But if my mind is idle then my thoughts always go back to it and with those thoughts comes the anxiety. Long drives can be uncomfortable. I’m at a state now where I’m in the clear: the symptoms are weak enough that they don’t threaten my ability to work and bathe and etc. and my ability to recognize and cope with the symptoms has increased a lot too. But it still bothers me sometimes and I am keeping my eye out for breakthrough treatments. Sgb and mdma look promising.<p>A thought can either be in your mind or not. When I’m feeling symptoms, it’s almost like the memories are somewhere in my mind, lurking. But other times they aren’t around. It’s like they have a life of their own. It’s something you don’t have control over.<p>The best coping mechanism I’ve found so far is meditation sort of. I think that part of ptsd is that your mind is fighting to block the memories and their emotional consequences. So when I feel symptoms I let my mind be open to any and all thoughts or memories. I totally relinquish control of my own thoughts and whatever comes into my mind, I allow it to come and then I watch it pass on. Opening the mind and simply observing the thoughts. This dramatically reduces the severity of my symptoms and often leads my mind to organically become preoccupied with something else.<p>It’s strange to think that a video can be so dangerous. But they can be. I was a grizzled veteran of gore videos and I thought surely that if they damaged the mind, I would have noticed a long time ago. Some videos, especially high definition ones, can for sure fuck you up. If you have children, don’t allow them access to the internet unfiltered. I saw this video on Reddit for Christ sake.

I can&#x27;t wait until my bank has to pay teams of people to keep child porn and beheadings off its website!

This story reads like a journalist trying to find some dirt on Facebook because its “hot” right now. Its the inverse of writing fluff stories when everyones excited about a startup. This story isn&#x27;t even Facebook.<p>I worked tech support for Acer in the 90s and its a similar setup. If they took the time to have “relaxation” rooms, i doubt its as bad as the story makes it out to be.