ABOUT THE CASE
Every day, YouTube users upload millions of videos to its platform. Many uploads include graphic and objectionable content such as child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide, and murder. To maintain a sanitized platform, maximize profits, and cultivate its public image, YouTube relies on “content moderators,” who view and remove videos that violate the corporation’s terms of use.
Working at YouTube’s offices in California or in offices of contract employers across the country, these content moderators—including plaintiff—witness thousands of acts of extreme and graphic violence and sexual assault. They spend hours a day ensuring that disturbing content like this never appears to YouTube’s users. As a result of unmitigated exposure to this highly toxic and extremely disturbing content, plaintiff developed and suffers from significant psychological trauma including anxiety, depression, and symptoms associated with PTSD.
YouTube (through its parent company Google, LLC) helped draft workplace safety standards to attempt to mitigate the negative psychological effects that viewing this content has on content moderators. These safety standards include obtaining a candidate’s informed consent during the initial employment interview process; providing content moderators with robust and mandatory counseling and mental health support; altering the resolution, audio, size, and color of trauma-inducing images and videos; and training content moderators to recognize the physical and psychological symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
Although these safety standards could not eliminate the risk that content moderators would develop negative psychological disorders after viewing this content, they could have reduced the risk. However, YouTube failed to implement these standards. Instead, it requires its content moderators to work under conditions it knows causes and worsens psychological trauma. This violates California law. Without the Court’s intervention, YouTube will continue to injure content moderators and breach the duties it owes to them.
YouTube content moderators’ safe workplace litigation is similar to Scola v. Facebook, a class action filed by the firm in which Facebook’s content moderators allegedly suffered from psychological trauma and PTSD, and were not protected by workplace safety standards. That suit resulted in Facebook agreeing to workplace improvements and a settlement of $52 million in damages for the Class.
Please contact Steven Williams (swilliams@saverilawfirm.com) if you have knowledge to share regarding the situation of content moderators working for YouTube or you would like additional information. Any information you provide will be kept strictly confidential as provided by law unless and until you agree to publicly disclose the information.
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