TikTok moderators file lawsuit against parent company for psychological trauma from watching too many offensive videos

The "new but old" incident has just continued to happen with TikTok when recently, a former employee of this video-sharing social networking platform filed a lawsuit against the parent company ByteDance due to serious psychological effects which she suffered after taking the position of content moderator of TikTok.

Source: RT

In a lawsuit filed in California's Central District Court, Candie Frazier alleges ByteDance failed to care for or adequately protect the mental health of its content moderators, when they were repeatedly forced to Watch violent, offensive videos. It contains "extremely disturbing" scenes, such as "scenes of violence, school shootings, fatal accidents, animal slaughter, raw meat eating, and even genocide..."
Candie Frazier and her colleagues said they had to work alternate shifts, with each shift lasting up to 12 hours, while only having 1 hour for lunch and 2 breaks of no more than 15 minutes.
"Due to the sheer volume of content, moderators like Candie Frazier are only allowed to spend no more than 25 seconds on each video, and must watch between three and 10 videos at the same time," the lawsuit says. In particular, ByteDance also closely monitors work performance and severely fines those who do not watch these videos or omit infringing content.

Source: TechCrunch

The lawsuit also states that ByteDance and TikTok failed to put in place appropriate measures to mitigate the harmful effects of censorship of harmful content on employees' mental health. Such as reasonable breaks, supporting psychological care courses, as well as applying technical measures such as blurring or reducing the resolution of the video being censored. These are all things ByteDance was perfectly capable of doing, but they didn't.
Medical records show that Frazier had suffered from "severe psychological trauma including depression and anxiety-related symptoms and PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder". This process in the long run has also led to burnt out physical health.
The reason that this is a "new but old" problem is because similar incidents have happened to major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Google. A similar lawsuit was filed against Facebook in 2018 and the result was that Facebook had to compensate its content moderators with a payment of $52 million.
Frazier hopes the lawsuit will help her and her colleagues get an adequate compensation for what they have to endure and tt the same time creating a more positive change to the work of content moderation on not only TikTok, but many other traditional social platforms.