This is a good set of jobs in the content moderation sphere but I noticed something leap out at me while reading through a selection: Twitter is the only employer I saw whose job listings warn applicants about the extremely distressing nature of the work. https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1357080926023413760

Theoretically, people applying for *most* of these would know that already -- they're a fairly senior collection of openings -- but even the entry level jobs from other employers that I looked at don't disclaim. That's a serious issue.

The greatest issue facing a manager in this field is hiring people who are resilient enough to do the work but not hardened so much that they lack compassion for the people experiencing problems. Get it wrong one way and you've got a team of sociopaths--

--and get it wrong the other way and you've got a team who's perpetually emotionally and psychologically devastated. Both of those failure states are terrible for the employees, for the users of the product, AND for the company.

In my experience screening applicants for ToS work, everyone thinks they are resilient enough to handle it, no matter what warnings you give them, and the best set of warnings and examples and screening I could put together had a 20% success rate or so.

There are also massive issues of privilege and perspective we don't talk about enough as an industry: marginalized people are experts in spotting and handling the weaponizing of ToS process and in more subtle forms of online abuse, but the psychological burden is higher on them--

--because it requires them to spend hours a day immersed in the very abuse they're experts on. Their expertise comes from living it outside work, and working it just adds to the burden, but if your team doesn't include them, you're missing so much abuse on your service.

It's been decades and we don't have good answers for this yet. We don't even have wide consensus on how to mitigate the hazards of the work. But warning applicants what the job entails is the bare minimum, and companies advertising these jobs are being negligent if they don't.