Access to on-site counseling is one of the few perks for the moderators hired to view and scrub hateful, gruesome content from Facebook and Instagram.
In Austin, Texas, the moderators are hired by Facebook contractor Accenture and exposed to up to 800 deeply disturbing images per shift, day in and day out, including rape, child sexual abuse and KKK memes.
Therapists are supposed to help this invisible workforce of content screeners to cope with an endless stream of sick-making images, videos, and text.
However, the outsourcing giant that officially employs the moderators, has repeatedly tried to violate the confidentiality of these therapy sessions, The Intercept reported.
About a dozen moderators who work in Austin posted a letter on an internal company-wide Facebook message board known as Workplace. In the letter, they allege that, starting in early July, Accenture managers tried to pressure on-site counselors to share confidential information discussed in employee trauma sessions.
The letter calls the alleged pressuring of workplace therapists “at best a careless breach of trust … and, at worst, an ethics and possible legal violation,” and “no longer an isolated incident but a systemic top-down problem plaguing Accenture management.”
Rolfe Lowe, an attorney of the firm Wachler & Associates who specializes in health care law and HIPAA compliance, told The Intercept that the incident as described likely didn’t constitute a HIPAA violation.
The Intercept
You can read the full letter, obtained by Intercept, here.
Workers have long complained they’re treated worse than Facebook’s Silicon Valley staffers, with one exception — access to free trauma therapy.
The Intercept interviewed moderators and sources at Accenture who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals.
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One source said that Austin moderators had originally been encouraged by counselors to talk among themselves when struggling with mental anguish, but this practice was soon banned by Accenture, the source said, because it affected productivity.
Cuts were also made to counselor access. Multiple Accenture sources told The Intercept that moderators previously got 45 minutes per week with a counselor or two hours a day for those viewing images of child sexual abuse. Today, moderators can’t access mental health care unless “their productivity was high enough for that day,” one of the sources said.
“Management’s idea of wellness is that it needs to be as minimal as possible,” another Accenture source said, “because any time not in production is seen as bad.”
In a statement, Accenture said, “These allegations are inaccurate. Our people’s wellbeing is our top priority.”
In some cases, the moderators don’t have any other work options, a source said. They are “poor, they’re felons, they’re people that don’t have any other options.”
Hundreds of moderators at Facebook in Austin sometimes share a single counselor for their shift. “We’re trash to them,” one moderator said. “We’re a body in a seat, and they don’t acknowledge the work we do.”
After a content moderator died in Tampa, Florida, at a subcontractor for Facebook, three of his peers at Cognizant decided to break their non-disclosure agreements to expose the working conditions they experienced.
