Frazier dropped her suit last month and is considering her options, according to her lawyer.
The lawsuit was filed on Thursday amid growing scrutiny of TikTok’s and other social media platforms’ content moderation methods, which has only grown as false claims and conspiracy theories about the Ukraine war proliferate. A countrywide collection of state attorneys general initiated an investigation into TikTok’s user engagement methods earlier this month, alleging possible dangers to young people. In response to the research, TikTok said in a statement that it limits its features by age, provides tools and services to parents, and designs its policies with young people’s well-being in mind.
TikTok had previously flown under the radar compared to larger rivals such as Facebook and YouTube, but has gained attention in recent months from critics and lawmakers after exploding in popularity, especially among young people, during the pandemic. The company said in September that it had reached 1 billion monthly active users. TikTok said last month it would strengthen efforts to regulate dangerous content, including harmful hoaxes and content that promotes eating disorders and hateful ideologies.
Velez and Young were not TikTok employees; instead they worked remotely for staffing firms that supply contractors to work as content moderators for the platform. Young worked as a TikTok moderator for New York-based Atrium Staffing Services for about 11 months starting in 2021, according to the complaint. Velez spent about seven months working as a TikTok moderator for Canada-based Telus International, the same firm that employed Frazier. Atrium and Telus did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Although they worked for two different companies, the complaint states that Velez and Young “performed the same tasks, in the same way, using applications provided by” TikTok and ByteDance, and that the social media giant set quotas, monitored and disciplined the moderators.
The lawsuit — which seeks approval as a class action — alleges that the moderators were exposed to disturbing content, including “a thirteen-year-old child being executed by cartel members” and “bestiality and necrophilia.” They also faced “repeated exposure” to fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories such as claims that the Covid-19 pandemic is a fraud, Holocaust denial and manipulated videos of elected officials, according to the complaint.
The complaint claims that because of the large volume of videos moderators must review, they often had fewer than 25 seconds to review each video and would view multiple videos simultaneously. Moderators are offered two 15-minute breaks and an hour-long lunch for each 12-hour workday, but ByteDance withholds payment to moderators if they are not on the moderation platform for any other time during the day, it alleges.
The lawsuit also accuses the company of failing to implement safeguards for moderators, such as blurring or changing the color of some disturbing videos, and of reducing the “wellness” time offered to moderators from one hour to 30 minutes each week.
“As a result of constant and unmitigated exposure to highly toxic and extremely disturbing images at the workplace, [Young and Velez] have suffered immense stress and psychological harm,” the complaint states. “Plaintiffs have sought counseling on their own time and effort due to the content they were exposed to.”
Theo Bertram, then-TikTok’s director of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told British lawmakers in September 2020 that the company had 10,000 people worldwide on its “trust and safety” team, which oversees content moderation policies and decisions. TikTok last year also launched an automated moderation system to scan and remove videos that violate its policies “upon upload,” although the feature is only available for certain content categories.
The system handles “content categories where our technology has the highest degree of accuracy, starting with violations of our policies on minor safety, adult nudity and sexual activities, violent and graphic content, and illegal activities and regulated goods,” a July blog post from TikTok’s Head of US Safety, Eric Han, reads. “We hope this update also supports resiliency within our Safety team by reducing the volume of distressing videos moderators view and enabling them to spend more time in highly contextual and nuanced areas.”
Nonetheless, according to the Thursday complaint, more than 81 million videos were taken from TikTok in the second quarter of 2021 – a statistic TikTok disclosed in February — with the majority being removed by human content censors rather than automated algorithms.
The suit also claims that as part of their positions, the moderators were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, which required them to “hold inside the horrible things they saw when reviewing content.” The charges in Thursday’s lawsuit are similar to those made in Frazier’s previous lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed on Thursday asks TikTok and ByteDance to pay for a medical monitoring programme to help diagnose and treat moderators’ mental health issues, as well as unspecified monetary penalties.