Facebook to pay moderators $52M for damages

A $52 million settlement has been reached in a groundbreaking lawsuit alleging that Facebook failed to properly protect content moderators, who were employed by Facebook’s vendors and responsible for viewing and removing disturbing, graphic and objectionable images and videos from the social media platform.

The settlement provides significant monetary relief to more than 10,000 current and former content moderators who worked for Facebook’s vendors in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. The workplace improvements apply to any U.S.-based content moderation operations for Facebook.

Filed in state court in California in September 2018, the lawsuit alleged that those who performed content moderation work on behalf of Facebook were denied protection against severe psychological and other injuries that can result from repeated exposure to graphic content such as child sexual abuse, beheadings, terrorism, animal cruelty, and other disturbing images.

The lawsuit sought to provide content moderators with mental health screening, treatment and compensation and to require Facebook to improve their working conditions.

The agreement achieves each of these goals, providing monetary relief in the amount of $1,000 to every member of the class. In addition, class members diagnosed with specified conditions as a result of their work will receive a payment that can go to medical treatment for that condition.

Facebook has had to quickly train its artificial intelligence to handle an increase in coronavirus content that violates company policies, including hundreds of thousands of posts removed for displaying information that could lead to physical harm, like encouraging users to drink bleach as a cure.