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The listening exercises in Business Spotlight Plus (p. 5) are based on the article “People who’ve seen too much” (Names & News, p. 9). Here, we provide you with the audio file and transcript.
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People who’ve seen too much
Starting a new job can be stressful, but on Trevin Brownie’s first day, he ended up vomitsich erbrechenvomiting in revulsionEkel, Abscheurevulsion. Brownie was a Facebook moderator. His job was to watch the most violent and graphichier: grausamgraphic videos uploaded by the platform’s nearly three billionMilliarde(n)billion users, and remove them before anyone else saw them. Watching a new video every 55 seconds or so, he’d categorize them according to Facebook’s content rules.
A South African, Brownie was one of many young Facebook moderators hired by Sama, a San Francisco-based outsourcing company, to work in Nairobi, Kenya. He was required to see dreadfulschrecklichdreadful things — including, by his own estimate, over 1,000 videos of beheadingEnthauptungbeheadings. This traumatic experience, Brownie says, has deaden sth.etw. abstumpfen, ersterben lassendeadened his feelings, taking away part of his humanity. He’s now one of 184 former moderators who are sue sb./sth.jmdn./etw. verklagensuing Sama and Facebook’s parent companyMuttergesellschaftparent company, Meta.
It’s the largest lawsuitProzesslawsuit of its kind in Kenya and could have global consequences for the tens of thousands of moderators who protect users from toxic content. Social media companies are under increasing pressure to moderate the content on their networks, but at what cost is this work being done?