Facebook to Add 3,000 Content Moderation Employees after Steve Stephens

Not three weeks after Steve Stephens randomly murdered Robert Godwin Sr. in Glenville and posted the video to Facebook, the international media behemoth has announced that it will hire 3,000 new employees to monitor violent content and review reports.

Mark Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post (included below), said that in order to build a “safe community,” the company must make violent videos easier to report. The 3,000 new employees will be added to a current global “community operations team” of 4,500 over the next year.

If “community operations” sounds like a euphemism, that’s because it is. The content moderators who keep the vilest material off the internet are increasingly located in the Philippines, and they’re tasked with almost unbearable work.

“Companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us,” Adrian Chen reported for Wired in 2014. “And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor.”

Within a year, there will be 3,000 more.

This article appears in May 3-9, 2017.