I don't claim to know whether working as a FB moderator is 'catastrophic' or not, but this article makes an emotional case for it rather than a rational case for it. It reminds me of reporting around the Foxconn suicides - sure, each is a tragedy, but it turns out the Foxconn suicide rate matches the national rate.
Think of the disgust or shock you might feel if you saw, say an adult flirting with a kid, or if that’s not graphic enough, having sex. Now imagine you need to see that every hour or so for your job, 5 days a week, forever. There’s no end, there’s no stopping people.
At best you lose some of your humanity and innocence - nothing really shocks you any more. At worst it causes some form of PTSD or you even sympathize with what you are seeing. I can see how that could be less painful in short term than continuing to be shocked and depressed with things you don’t agree with.
Some things are just stupefyingly obvious. For example, constantly looking at videos of puppies getting microwaved or people getting beheaded in front of their kids for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week just might really fuck with you.
Like, what data do you want to back that up?
Please don't reduce people to data like this. Plese don't automatically assume bad faith on the part of the authors of the article. Consider there are actual people involved here, reporting their experiences. Don't make it into some kind of social-justice battleground or science experiment, just consider their perspective without instant judgment.
Appeals to emotion and innumeracy are serious problems in society right now and it's totally reasonable to identify when people pushing an argument are either appealing to emotion or being innumerate, so that others can plainly see that an argument lacks more substance than it appears to have.
Given that I didn't see any specific plan of action or policy advocated in this article, I just don't see the need to jump out an immediately attack and discount it. People are so used to arguing in black and white, we suddenly have to start fighting over an article that reports on people's experiences doing a job that we all would agree, really, really sucks. Appeal to emotion, maybe. But krimeney, have some empathy.