TikTok moderator sues over 'psychological trauma'

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A former TikTok moderator is suing the company, claiming it failed to protect her mental health after constant exposure to traumatic video content.

Candie says she reviewed videos for up to 12 hours a day.

She suffers from a number of psychological traumas, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

TikTok wants to promote a caring working environment.

In September, TikTok announced that 1 billion people use the app each month. According to Cloudflare, it now has more hits than the internet giant.

The video-sharing platform uses thousands of in-house and contract content moderators to remove videos and accounts that break its rules.

Ms Frazier is a shareholder in Bytedance.

She claims that she watched a lot of graphic content while she was a moderator, including videos of sexual assault, cannibalism, genocide, mass shootings, child sexual abuse, and the killing of animals.

She was required to review hundreds of videos a day, and she worked for a third-party contractor.

According to the lawsuit filed with a federal court in California last week, Ms Frazier suffered " significant psychological trauma, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder" because of the material she was required to review.

The lawsuit claims that she was not an employee of TikTok, but that the social-media giant controlled the means and manner in which content moderation occurred.

She was expected to review as many as 10 videos in order to handle the volume of content.

The lawsuit claims that during a 12-hour shift, there was a 15-minute break after the first four hours of work, and then a 15-minute break every subsequent two hours. There was a break for lunch.

It claims that TikTok failed to meet industry standards designed to reduce the impact of content moderation, and that the firm violated California labour law by not providing a safe work environment.

TikTok wouldn't comment on the case, but it did say it wanted to promote a caring working environment for employees and contractors.

The company stated that they work with third-party firms to protect the TikTok platform and community, and that they also expand on a range of wellbeing services.

TikTok believes that its measures to protect moderators are in line with industry best practice.

Last year, TikTok was part of a coalition of social-media giants that created guidelines to protect employees from child sex-abuse imagery.

Telus International told the Washington Post that it had robust mental-health programmes in place and that its employees could raise concerns through " several internal channels".

The firm told the paper that the allegations were completely inconsistent with their policies and practices.

Telus International was approached by the BBC.

In 2020, Facebook agreed to pay out over $50 million to people who had developed post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their work.

Social media.
TikTok is a song.
Mental health.