Anyone who is in a line of work that deals with horrifying human behaviour can often find themselves under immense emotional stress.

Like soldiers, police and emergency medical personnel, the latest addition to this seemingly growing list is Facebook moderators.

According to The Telegraph, Facebook moderators are “developing post-traumatic stress disorder because the company is using them as “human filters” for the most horrific content on the internet”.

This was announced by Dr Mary Aiken – a forensic cyberpsychologist who studies the impact of technology on human behaviour and an academic advisor to the European Cyber Crime Centre at Europol – after Facebook announced it would be hiring an extra 3 000 moderators to “review terrorist material, child exploitation videos and hate speech”.

Dr Aiken (below) said the move was highly irresponsible and a “useless number when set against Facebook’s two billion users”.

“When Facebook say that they’re hiring 3,000 moderators, I’d say two things,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival.

“You’ve two billion members, one post a day – that’s two billion pieces of data. No good, having 3,000 moderators.

“And secondly, I have a major ethical problem with 3,000 young people coming out of college and being exposed to that extreme content and being used as human filters by any commercial entity.”

Using examples from her work, Dr Aiken noted that:

Post-traumatic stress disorder, early signs of it, in the content moderators who are looking at extreme content. It’s only a matter of time before we see post-traumatic stress disorder in children who are looking at extreme content.

Facebook, of course, declined to comment.

[source:telegraph]