Social media companies are outsourcing their dirty work to the Philippines. A generation of workers is paying the price.

John W. Tomac for The Washington Post (John W. Tomac/For The Washington Post) MANILA — A year after quitting his job reviewing some of the most gruesome content the Internet has to offer, Lester prays every week that the images he saw can be erased from his mind. First as a contractor for YouTube and then for Twitter, he worked on a high-up floor of a mall in this traffic-clogged Asian capital, where he spent up to nine hours each day weighing questions about the details in those images. He made decisions about whether a child’s genitals were being touched accidentally or on purpose, or whether a knife slashing someone’s neck depicted a real-life killing — and if such content should be allowed online. He’s still haunted by what he saw. Today, entering a tall building triggers flashbacks to the suicides he reviewed, causing him to entertain the possibility of jumping. At night, he Googles footage of bestiality and incest — material he was never exposed to before but now is ashamed that he is drawn to. For the last year, he has visited a mall chapel every week, where he works with a church brother to ask God to “white out” those images from his memory. “I know it’s not normal, but now everything is normalized,” said the 33-year-old, using only his first name because of a confidentiality agreement he signed when he took the job. Workers such as Lester are on the front lines of the never-ending battle to keep the Internet safe. But thousands of miles separate the Philippines and Silicon Valley, rendering these workers vulnerable to exploitation by some of the world’s tech giants. In the last couple of years, social media companies have created tens of thousands of jobs around the world to vet […]

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