The Vergecast - Casey Newton on the secret life of Facebook moderators
Episode Date: February 26, 2019In “The Trauma Floor,” The Verge’s Casey Newton uncovered the horrendous working conditions for contract Facebook moderators. On this week’s Vergecast, he and editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discu...ss how he uncovered them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey everybody.
It's now from the Vergecast.
On the newest week's interview episode,
we got one of our own.
We have Casey Newton,
the Verges Silicon Valley editor.
He has been working on a huge feature
about what it's like to moderate content
for Facebook.
He's been working on it for weeks, months.
As you know, Casey writes the interface
a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy.
And some moderators who are tasked with removing
the bad content from Facebook reached out to him.
And he went and met them.
They worked for a contractor called Cognizant
in Arizona. He talked to them what it's like to live that life, to deal with that trauma,
to see that bad stuff every day. And then Facebook actually invited him in to look at the
facility. So he saw it, met with some other moderators, some managers there. And he really
unpacked just how much hidden work is done to keep a huge platform like Facebook relatively
clean. And it's not perfect, but it's super interesting. These are real people who are making
just $15 an hour tasked with looking at some of the worst stuff posted to Facebook and deciding
whether it stays up or goes down.
So check this out.
Here's Casey.
All right, we have Casey Newton here.
Casey is our Silicon Valley editor.
He is also the writer, the author, the host of the interface,
which is a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy.
Welcome, Casey.
Hey, it's great to be here, Neely.
You just published a blockbuster story on Theverge.com today about the lives of the people
who moderate Facebook.
And there's 15,000 of these folks around the world,
but there are more and more of them in the United States.
and you found some of them.
That's right.
In December of last year, I got a tip from a newsletter reader that the working conditions at one of these sites where Facebook moderates content were really bad.
And they wanted to talk about it.
And so we got on the phone.
And so for the next three months, I talked to everyone I could who ever worked at this site.
And I've actually heard from a few more of them today, which has been really interesting.
But for the purposes of the story, there were about a dozen people who contributed something.
And collectively, they painted a portrait of a workplace that was often on the brink of chaos.
I want to start there.
It doesn't seem like there's another state for this to be in.
And I want to unpack that a little bit.
What is the actual job that they're doing?
What they do is they use a piece of software called Single Review Tool or SART, and it offers a
an endless cue of posts that someone somewhere in the world has reported for violating Facebook's
content policy. So some of the stuff is benign. Some of this is just people trolling their friends by
reporting their posts. But of course, a lot of it is really disturbing. It's violent content.
It's graphic sexual content. It's child exploitation. It's stuff that if you look at it long enough
can have really lasting and negative effects on your mental health. And so, you know, you sort of ask,
like what is the job? The job is to work an eight-hour shift where you're going to be asked to look at
maybe 300, maybe 400 if you're really moving quickly posts per day, and then spending less
than 30 seconds on each item, decide whether it adheres to Facebook's very lengthy community guidelines.
And as the story points out, those guidelines are actually changing almost every day.
So the job is you fire up this tool,
called single review tool. It just shows you something on Facebook, somebody reported, and you
click yes or no based on what you know of Facebook's guidelines. That's right. And if you say this is
violating, then you have to say why it's violating. And you sort of also have to say, like,
in what order it's violating. So like this very weird quirk of the system that I didn't describe
in the story is if like if something depicts violence, but there's also nudity in the image,
which actually like happens a lot. And you, you mark the post as violating for being violent, that will
count against your accuracy score because what you should have marked it for was having nudity,
which is like the highest order violation in Facebook's rules.
At one point in the story, you described this as a video game. And I think what you just
described is the worst video game of all time. It honestly really boggled my mind, too,
because I think we could agree that the important thing to everyone is that we get this stuff
off of Facebook and Instagram. Nobody wants to, well, I shouldn't say nobody, but almost nobody wants
to look at this stuff. And so the idea that you would discipline and even fire moderators,
they marked the wrong reason for why they deleted a post that included violence and nudity.
It does kind of strain my credulity.
So these moderators go to work.
They use the SRT tool.
They're clicking away.
They're trying to get it right.
How does Facebook measure whether they're right or not?
How does Facebook maintain quality in this system?
So there's this great quote from a person I talked to in the story who says,
accuracy is only measured by agreement.
So here's how it works.
Let's say someone is obviously selling heroin to someone else.
For whatever reason, I miss it, and so I mark that as it's benign.
We'll leave it up on the site.
That goes into my big bucket of all of the decisions I made during the week.
Well, at the end of the week, someone known as a QA, a quality assurance worker,
is going to receive a random subset of all of the decisions that I've made over the past week,
let's say 50 or 60 of my decisions.
and then the auditor, the QA, is going to go through that list and see whether they agree with all of my decisions.
If the auditor agrees with me, then I performed an accurate action.
And if the moderator disagrees, then it was inaccurate.
Now, of course, Facebook itself is then going to audit a subset of the QA's decisions.
And so it's from those interactions that this accuracy number is judged.
But, you know, as you can imagine, there have been cases where, you know,
a reviewer will be marked as incorrect for an action that they took, and then they'll go to the moderator and say, oh, come on, man, like, you got to help me out here.
And then it'll just kind of get changed back. And if it never gets audited, then congratulations, you made an accurate decision.
That sounds horrifying. I'm just going to be honest with you. The idea that, A, there are these rules that are sort of opaque to the users of Facebook to us who pay a lot of attention to Facebook to Congress, which seems to be aggressively interested in getting Facebook wrong.
There's just like set of rules that nobody understands.
And then how we interpret the rules, how Facebook interprets the rules, is really caught up in layers of agreement.
It seems like that's a system that can never be optimized fully.
It's hard to know how else you do it when you're dealing with questions that have so many shades of gray, right?
Every year, the guidelines get longer.
And it's because every year we have more and more experience with moderating,
human speech, right? So this document that these moderators rely on, it's just going to grow and
grow and grow. And the idea that you could get it to a place where there would be unanimous
agreement about whether to take down something or not, it just doesn't really hold any
waters. Like, someone is going to have to be making these calls. But at the same time, I think by
calling it accuracy and by firing moderators for making just a handful of mistakes away,
week against this policy, you've created this incredibly high pressure job where people who are making
$15 an hour and who've been entrusted with these very important questions of speech and security,
they're now being held to this standard that many of them described to me is impossible.
So like that nature of the work where you must be accurate and yet accuracy is also just kind
of what what folks on the ground agree with, I think is really problematic.
By the way, that $15 an hour is a full-time job, it adds up to what, 28,800 a year? Yeah, 28,800 a year. And, you know, if you stay on for a year, you can get a 47 cents an hour increase. But these are low-paying jobs. Now, what Facebook would say is, well, we pay 20% more than the minimum wage in every market that we're in. And Cognizant, which is the contractor that ran the site that I write about here, has said to me that they've had very good luck in recruiting.
So, you know, from their perspective, this has been a success.
But one of the things I try to explore in the story is kind of the absurdity of taking a job that is so important and paying it basically as little as you can get away with.
Like $15 an hour isn't the minimum wage in Arizona, but it is the minimum wage in an increasing number of locales around the country.
I mean, just the fact of it is that's how much the value of the job.
Exactly.
$15 an hour.
And this is the thing that they get caught the most against, right, is what are these decisions,
what are you censoring?
What gets to stay up?
What gets to come down?
And if they're kind of openly saying,
this is how much we value the people making these individual decisions.
It seems like that disconnect is a lot bigger than Facebook wants to admit.
Here's what I think is going on.
When you look at what Facebook has said about content moderation over the past couple of years,
they're always very quick to point out the amount of moderation
that they're able to do via machine learning,
AI and how that number is growing over time. So in the context of ISIS, for example, they're
typically able to identify ISIS content now really quickly and maybe prevent it from ever even
being uploaded. And that's a good thing. I think the problem, though, is that when you start
talking about it in those terms, you have already decided that the job that you're doing is
essentially a machine job and that these 15,000 workers that you've hired around the world to do
this are effectively a stopgap measure. And they're going to be given this task for only as long
as until the machine can do it. And of course, as a result, you're not going to see the people
who are doing this job fully as people, right? You're going to see them as as cogs in a machine.
And so a lot of what I wanted to kind of explore in this story was just the humanity of these people
and like what is their lived experience of doing a job and try to separate that just from this
system that has been built up around them.
There's a very famous poster that's hung up at Facebook headquarters that a lot of people have been tweeting in response to your story today, which is there's literally a poster at Facebook headquarters that says contractors are people too.
And I think that that's the thing that makes the point that you are saying is Facebook is reminding itself that its contractors are also human beings.
There is something so dark about that to me because obviously the person who created that poster did so with good intentions.
and I bet that whoever made that poster probably has thought more about the humanity of these contractors than maybe some other people at the company.
But certainly the idea that you need a reminder, it is a great concern.
Like, there was a great story in the Wall Street Journal a week or two ago about how many big companies now rely on outsourced labor and how it's just a seemingly never-ending, growing part of the U.S. economy.
So a lot of companies rely on that labor.
But I think we have to start asking ourselves about the kinds of jobs that we are asking this outsource labor to do.
And then what are the unintended consequences of having it be contracted?
And like this story is essentially just like a litany of like some of the bad things that can happen when you let these things get out of your direct site.
So just real quick, you went to this facility.
You went down there.
You met a bunch of people.
We came back and then you did the responsible thing.
You said to Facebook, I'm doing the story.
I need a comment.
And then Facebook invited you in the facility.
Yeah, that's right.
Last week, several days before we were going to publish the story, I sort of reached out to Facebook.
I said, you know, here's what I've been doing.
Here's what I've talked to.
Here's what they've said.
And they surprised me by inviting me to the site.
And the reason it was a surprise was as far as I know, this is the first time that Facebook has invited a reporter to one of its American content moderation sites since it started expanding the program around the world in 2017.
And, you know, as you may remember, the reason that they started expanding in 2017 was after the U.S. election, there was a lot of, you know, worrying that Facebook wasn't doing an effective job at moderating content.
And so they started, like, hiring, you know, all of these extra people.
But we hadn't really seen one of the inside of these facilities in America or talked to the American contractors.
And so, you know, I had the opportunity to do that.
And I'm really glad I went.
And I do think it added a bunch to the story.
So one of my favorite things is Facebook loves to say.
say these are not dark and dingy places.
We have some photos.
They actually let us take a photographer with you.
It is, in fact, a bright and area office.
But that's where the similarity to, like, a regular Facebook office runs out, right?
What does it like to go to work at this place?
What happens there?
So, to me, the biggest difference is just the degree to which your time is managed at this site.
It is managed down to the second.
You get two 15-minute breaks.
You get a 30-minute lunch.
And then you get nine minutes per day of something called wellness.
time, which many people have said on Twitter today, reminds them of a George Saunders short story.
But every time you leave your desk, you have to click a Chrome extension that says why effectively.
And when I asked Facebook about why that is, I was told, well, that's just sort of how things
are done in this industry. But this winds up having a lot of negative consequences for the workers.
I mean, beyond just sort of the lack of freedom, you know, something that happens to workers
during the day is they want to use the bathroom, right? So they have these limited breaks, and the space
for a long time had just a single bathroom with only a few stalls for the men and the women, and so
there will be lines to use the restroom. And because of this, you know, once they were done using
the restroom, they might only have a couple of minutes to go to their locker where they have
to store their phone because, you know, for good reason, Facebook doesn't want them to be tempted to
take pictures of private information. But, you know, in effect, after they use the bathroom,
they have like six minutes of break a day or something like that. And so people started using
their wellness time to go to the bathroom. But then Facebook found out that that was happening
and all of the employees were ordered not to use their wellness time to go to the bathroom.
I should also say, I interviewed three of these people for about a four-hour stretch in each case
and not one of them used the bathroom. And when I sort of pointed that out, they said, oh, yeah,
like, we've been trained. And I was, you know, yeah, I know. It was.
It was a dark moment.
So they go in, they sit down, their time has managed the second, they start reviewing things, and then it seems like that just accumulates trauma because they're looking in a bunch of horrible stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, I have heard from so many moderators who work for Facebook and other sites today.
They've been blowing up my DMs and my emails.
And what appears to be this universal phenomenon is you get so close to your coworkers in a hurry.
I mean, this really is a foxhole that you're working in.
And so people are just sending what they call jobs all around the floor.
So a job is something that's been reported.
And, you know, somebody will just see something incredibly offensive joke and they'll just
send it to a friend.
Essentially, whatever your ethnicity is at one of these sites, people will just send you
offensive content about your ethnicity or about your religion as a way of like joking around
and be like, man, you know, can you believe this?
And, you know, no one who I talked to you necessarily thought that was a bad thing,
but I do think it speaks to just kind of the, the great.
rimness of this environment. And then, of course, in addition to just like kind of, you know,
racist and offensive speech that gets traded around, there's a lot of dark talk about suicide,
you know, and it's it's jokey talk about suicide. But in this kind of environment, it's, you know,
really concerning. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back with Casey Newton.
There's a vignette in your story where a bunch of moderators see somebody else in the roof of a building across the way.
Yes.
And they just wait to see if that person will jump because they're just trained because they've seen so many suicide videos.
That it's that stuff that just really continually hit home with me as we were working on this piece.
Yeah.
That particular anecdote was so chilling for me because what we're asking these people to do is pattern match, right?
like we want them to see content and then be like, oh yeah, like this is a bad thing. It's got to be removed from Facebook. But they never stopped doing it. And so even when they just see a coworker on the roof, their mind just immediately goes to this is going to be a suicide. And like a lighter example of the same thing, somebody told me about watching Netflix. And as characters would say various things in their mind, the moderator would just be like, well, we'd remove that because, you know, that's saying that, you know, Irish people are inferior or, you know, whatever.
whatever. So, you know, moderators I spoke with talked about sort of not being able to turn off this kind of thinking once they left the office.
I mean, it's so funny that we start out calling you a video game and what you're describing to me is dreaming about Tetris, but with the worst things imaginable.
It's really hard. And, you know, I should say, you know, while I was at the Facebook site, I did talk to some moderators, you know, who had volunteered to speak with me.
And Facebook knew they were going to speak with me. And their manager sat next to them while they spoke with me.
You know, some people would say, well, you know, there's no way they're going to tell you the truth.
But I don't think these people would have volunteered to speak, you know, if they weren't sincere.
And I took all of them at their word.
And one of them said, look, like, don't overstate the amount of this content that we see.
You know, a lot of the stuff we see is really benign, you know, and the rest of them sort of said, look, like, we, we like this work because we believe we're making a difference.
And which they are, by the way, a huge difference.
And they thought that they were sort of taken care of and supported.
So there is another view of this.
And I do want to say this.
It is not the case that every single moderator has the experience of some of the other people that I wrote about in the story.
But do I think this phenomenon is much bigger than it has previously been talked about and that it probably has other dimensions that we still haven't explored yet?
Yeah, completely.
The one dimension I think is absolutely worth exploring and studying is the notion that being exposed to conspiracy theories and misinformation will make you believe it.
Even if your job is to delete it.
Yeah.
And you definitely, you spoke to some folks who.
they believe that 9-11 was an inside job, which is false, and who believe the world is flat,
which is false. And this seems to just come up a little bit more often than anyone would reasonably hope.
Absolutely. I mean, even for folks that I spoke with who had not felt affected in that way,
they did tell me that they felt in danger of that, right? I talked to one person who said that after
they watched their 15th Alex Jones video, they thought, oh, he's starting to make some sense.
And then they caught themselves, and they're like, oh, my God, I need to stop doing this.
You know, after my story came out today, somebody tweeted at me that there has been apparently some research on this subject and that academic researchers who study misinformation have experienced similar effects. It is a phenomenon that is somewhat known, apparently, but when I asked Facebook incognizant about it, it was news to them. Like, they said that they had not been previously aware of this phenomenon. One of the reasons I think it's important to think through the implications of that is that this might be a job that you have for six or eight months before you get fired. I heard a story that
almost an entire training class, which, you know, involves dozens of people, almost an entire
class was walked out the door on their final day of training because they weren't accurate enough.
Other people I talked to started having panic attacks during training, right? So think about
what kind of lasting effect on your psyche might come from doing this job for a year and then
how long this job will have changed you forever. I think that the lasting impacts can be
quite severe. And again, for $15 an hour, it just doesn't seem like a good bargain.
Most of the people that you talk to, they seem to have lasted a year or two years.
And then there's some people who are like, I like this. I'm going to stay in. I see career
opportunities. Yeah. And look, I mean, there are people who are doing similar kinds of jobs
for the FBI, right? There are other folks out there who have to look at really grim content
and who choose to do it at least for a time because they can make the world a better place by
scrubbing it from the internet. I think what most of those folks have in common, though,
is that they get paid a lot more money and that in many cases they're doing a job that is so
important that taxpayers pay for it, right? That like you and I pay money so that they do that.
We recognize that as a societal level need, a society level need, I guess I should say.
And when you look at the size of Facebook and Instagram, right, reaching more than two billion
people around the world every month, moderating that content is actually a society-level need.
And we haven't thought about it in that way yet, but this is yet another consequence of
having a platform that has grown that large.
Just before we came on, our producer, Zach and I were talking about other kinds of jobs
where we inflict this level of pain on people and trauma on people.
The United States government routinely sends young people into war.
But then they come back and we valorize them.
We have police and firefighters.
We valorize them as first responders.
There does not appear to be that additional level of valor and value ascribed to the people using the single review tool at a contractor in Phoenix.
And there absolutely should be.
And actually, for me, maybe the most exciting part of writing this story was the hope that I could shed light on the work that they do.
Because, again, as somebody who uses Facebook and Instagram, I benefit from their work every day, even though I will never know their names.
There's an interesting dimension to this, which involves secrecy.
So Facebook actually has very good reason for not wanting us to know the names of and valorize individual content moderators.
One reason is their personal safety.
If somebody knows that you are a Facebook content moderator, maybe they confront you in public because one of your posts got taken down and you want to have a conversation about it, right?
Or maybe you want to have a violent confrontation about it.
So Facebook takes pains to protect the identities of these people and prevent the public from knowing who they are for that very good reason.
which I support. There's another good reason, which is if you didn't have these moderators sign
some kind of nondisclosure agreement, they might feel like they could share Facebook users
personal information and say, oh yeah, like I saw this crazy thing today, right? That could have
really negative privacy consequences. So for those reasons, there's a lot of secrecy around what
these folks are doing. But one of the things that I wanted to point out was just how awful the
consequences of that secrecy can be, right? Because not only do these people not get the credit
that they deserve for the work that they do, but many of the ones that I spoke to actually felt
nervous about sharing their work days with even their spouses, their partners, their loved ones,
they felt like they should never refer to the work they did at Facebook or that might be
yet another thing that could get them fired. And so that increased their feelings of loneliness
and alienation, and, you know, I think could potentially put some vulnerable people at risk.
So that secrecy element is a real double-edged sword.
You mentioned earlier at Facebook, Google, any platform company, they always talk about AI,
and that the real answer to this is we don't want to traumatize people, we understand we need to
moderate, we're going to build these systems to recognize this stuff automatically.
Do you think that is realistic?
One thing that really struck me was they need to locate this facility.
They need to locate it in the countries that Facebook operates in because the amount of local context you need to make these decisions is so high.
Can they actually solve this problem?
You know, it's an open question for me.
I'm not even sure that the moderators have the cultural context that they need.
Like in some big ways, yes.
Like they understand American slang maybe in a way that somebody in another country might not understand American slang.
But moderators gave me all these examples of, you know, some figure would be in the news.
XXXTentacion, like who died. And like none of the moderators knew who he was. I shouldn't say
none. Most of them didn't. And because he's a public figure, he's subject to a different set of
rules. So if you don't know that he's a public figure, then you're going to take the wrong action
on a piece of content, which, you know, then could potentially put your job at risk. You know,
when there is some major breaking, trending news, Facebook does issue updates to the moderators,
although I was also shown several cases and other people have reported about times when Facebook has distributed erroneous information to the moderators.
But in a lot of cases, these folks just don't have the cultural context that they need.
And I think that something of the big platforms should think about is how they can empower their moderators with more context.
You know, I talked to somebody who took down a diamond and silk video, which is like an explosive thing if you've, you know, followed their antics in Congress over the past year.
and it was just because she didn't know they were public figures.
And she saw two women ranting and she thought it was bullying.
And so she took it down.
And then, you know, later she learned that there are public figures and that
ranting is their shtick.
And again, like, she is the one that is going to suffer the consequence for having
taken that wrong action, you know, and not Facebook for providing that cultural context.
So absolutely the platforms need to think more about it.
Can they think about it enough so they can automate it with an AI system?
Here's what I don't know is if all of these things were just much smaller, would we be better off?
You know, somebody reached out to me from Wikipedia, wanted to talk about how they do moderation there.
So I'm really excited to talk with him because I think that they maybe have a better experience.
You know, I'm on Reddit a fair bit and like Reddit seems like a site that is like if you go to the right Reddits, they're actually very well moderated.
And because they're so community specific, like everyone who's moderating has the relevant.
event context. So I do think there's something in just shrinking down the size of these groups
probably does make things easier. When you're talking about a platform that has two billion
people, how do you distribute the appropriate cultural context for any single thing that could
happen at any time and then distributed in 50 languages in 20 sites around the world? That does
seem like a super hard problem to me. The Reddit comparison is particularly interesting because
if you just compare the main Facebook product, which is the news feed, to Reddit, Reddit has
however X million smaller news feeds
and then every thread
inside of every subreddit
is its own little news feed
and all those can be moderated
in RevCron by a community
but no one can sort of see
the whole scope of the Facebook newsfeed
and so you have to break it up
and that might just be the design flaw of Facebook
it might just be the thing that can't be fixed
it seems like the problem
is you can't ever make that thing smaller
yeah I mean Facebook has like you know
like any startup you build a thing
and you try to grow it really fast
and then you try to fix the problems that pop up as you're growing it.
And, you know, this is not the first story about Facebook getting really big
and being unable to, you know, handle one of the things that broke along the way.
Do they think this is broken?
I mean, that's really the fundamental question.
The sort of Facebook people you talk to in the story, they struck me very much as,
well, this is how it is how it is how it is how it is.
This is how it is how it is how it is how it is.
Click a Chrome extension every, you know, eight seconds, let us know you're at work.
And this is just how it goes.
The official message is like, yes, we can do this. We know it's really hard. We're learning as we go. We want to do better. That is the official line of frustration that I have is I don't feel like I actually got to talk to any of the real decision makers at Facebook about this. I didn't get to talk to whoever designed the system. I'm actually not sure who did design it, although, as you mentioned, this is the system that is used by most of the big tech platforms. But I think we need to have a conversation about this. And that conversation is really about how do you make a lot more of these people full-time employees?
and how do you pay them double what they're making?
If not triple, yeah.
They're not making a ton of money here.
I think this conversation changes if instead of $28,000 a year or $29,000 a year,
these are all people making $100,000 plus $1,000 a year.
Completely, completely.
I even think at $60,000 a year, which is what you might pay a starting salary for a police officer,
like it just starts to feel more fair.
And when you're making 60 versus 28, you can have.
forward better mental health care. Like, obviously it's not a panacea. It just sort of feels like a
starting point to me. Yeah. So what do you think happens next? Well, Facebook called while we're
having this conversation. So that will be a turn of the screw. You know, I'm going to continue
this reporting. I have been so delighted by the response from other content moderators who want to
talk with me about what they're seeing at big companies and small companies. There's clearly a lot
of this that cuts across a variety of services. And I just think it's an important.
avenue for more reporting. We should know more about how this affects people and we should know more
about how platforms are going to support these people. I mean, this is the hidden machinery of the
entire internet and it's just a bunch of people clicking as fast as they can. Yes, there is something
that is so wild about that. You know, one of the final points that the story makes is that this
machinery is hidden from you on purpose. Like no one really has any incentive to let you know what's
going on in the background. But I think we do need to start talking about it.
It must have been easy for some people to dismiss this work when it was all being done far overseas.
You know, if you're an American reading this story or listening to this podcast, like, these are your friends and neighbors.
And like that's a conversation that I think we should have to you.
Not to say that the moderators in other countries don't deserve all the support and empathy as the Americans do because they do.
But I just think it's harder to ignore here.
All right. Well, Casey, you write about this literally every day in the interface.
You want to tell people how to get that?
Sure, you can go to theverge.com slash interface and find a link to sign up.
And hey, if you know more about this story, you know, get in touch, tweet at me at
Casey Newton, send me an email, Casey at the verge.com.
All right, Casey, thank you so much for doing the story.
Thank you for coming on.
I'm sure you're going to be making the meteor rounds this week.
So look for Casey everywhere.
But we got him first on the Vergecast.
Thanks a lot, buddy.
Thanks for having me, Eli.
All right, so that was Casey.
If you haven't read the trauma floor yet, which is the story we were discussing with
Facebook moderators, go look on the Vergellors.
go look on the verge search for it.
It is riveting.
It is wonderful.
It's some of Casey's best work.
I highly encourage you to read it and really think about the costs of keeping these platforms operating.
And then let us know what you think, especially if you've worked in one of these facilities.
We'll be back later this week with a regular verge cast.
That'll be wild.
MWC is still in full swing.
Foldable phones everywhere.
And next week, very excited about this.
Ashley Carman and I interviewed Mike McNano, the CEO of Anchor.
It's a little podcasting startup that just got bought by Spotify for a number.
well, we're going to try to make him tell us what the number was.
We'll see you then.
