Welcome to a weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Right Home, I'm Brian McCullough.

It's rare that I've seen an investigative piece get as much pickup as the trauma floor,

Casey Newton's look at the secret lives of Facebook content moderators.

That piece was all anyone could talk about at the beginning of the week.

Hope you've read it. If not, link in the show notes.

So today, simple, we're going to talk to Casey and dig a bit deeper into the story.

How did it happen? What has the reaction been, and a couple of implications of the piece, at least to me.

Here's Casey Newton.

So you mentioned that this story came about because someone reached out to you.

Was it just one person that reached out to you at the beginning?

Initially, yeah. So I write a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy called the interface and a person

reach out to me saying that they were a content moderator for Facebook and they wanted to

talk with me about the working conditions at their site and so I hopped on the phone and over the next three months I wound up speaking to seven people initially who had or are doing this job.

And then that led me going to the site itself. So I all told it's been about a three month process right and what I'm curious about is

Were these people like dying to talk like was it easy to get people to talk to you after that initial one or was it

a sort of convincing people sort of thing? I definitely had to do some convincing.

I think that these folks are nervous about talking for some good reasons.

They've signed nondisclosure agreements.

They don't have a lot of money if a big company wanted to go after them for some reason

like that could be a really scary thing you know and also they're talking about

some really hard stuff they're talking about their mental health, their mental state. And so I did try to do a lot of work to earn their trust. I flew out to meet them personally. I spent a lot of time with them and just really

try to understand their stories as best as I could so I could, you know, hopefully do them

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