Unspeakably graphic The workers who are paying a high price for policing the internet

Smashing bricks against the side of your house is not a normal way to wind down after work. Nor is biting your own arm or being scared to go to sleep.

- Robert Booth Caroline Kimeu Nairobi

But that was the reality for one of the 144 people diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder after moderating horrific content for Facebook.

The young mother in her 20s did the job in Nairobi for more than two years, during which she says she had to vet unspeakably graphic videos. These included extreme sexual deviancy and bestiality, child abuse, torture, dismemberment and murder, which caused her to vomit, according to court filings.

The woman was one of hundreds of young Africans, many from Kenya, who worked from 2019 to 2023 at an outsourcing company, Samasource, used by Facebook's owner, Meta, to protect its hundreds of millions of users from the worst of the torrent of images and video uploaded to the social media platform every minute.

According to a compensation claim filed in Kenyan courts by 185 of the moderators, they toiled through day and night shifts in a facility with glaring bright lights, chilly air conditioning, uncomfortable seats and screens at full brightness. There was close monitoring of performance levels that could lead to contract termination if they dipped. They typically had one minute to evaluate each piece of content - but it could be seared into their mind's eye for much longer.

From the outside, the Samasource offices look like a regular corporate workplace. In the front of the building, in a bustling business park by a busy road, there is a fountain and a poster that reads "the soul of AI". It would be a rare passerby who would suspect the darkness that coursed within.

A woman in her 30s told expert witness psychiatrists that she worked on one video that showed a man being dismembered limb from limb until he died. She cried and walked out of her workstation to compose herself, but the team leader followed her and asked her to get back to work.