"Content moderation" is a euphemistic term for the filtering work carried out by certain individuals on social media, with the aim of preventing people from posting real atrocities. Indeed, networks (especially those with the greatest global reach, such as Facebook, Instagram, X or TikTok) continually receive thousands of videos, for many of which the adjective "garbage" falls sadly short. A large part of them are due to people who, for whatever reason, decide to film themselves committing crimes, the more violent, gruesome and convoluted the better. Rape, murder, mutilation, desecration, in which the victims can be animals, but also babies, the elderly, pregnant women, corpses, etc. And a large number of suicides, too.
The job of a content moderator is to review all this material and weed it out so it's not published. Sometimes the level of violence or offensiveness of these videos falls along a more subtle line (between what's tolerable and what isn't, and especially between what's legal and what isn't), and then the content moderator is also responsible for determining what's published and what isn't. They have little time to do this (most of the time, it seems), and in return, they're under great pressure: if they make a mistake, it's their responsibility, and the company will penalize them. They also suffer significant psychological strain due to the extreme nature of the audiovisual material they're required to review, and they often suffer from stress, anxiety, or depression.
Telus International is a content moderation company that until a few days ago worked for Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and was headquartered in Barcelona's Torre de las Aguas, or Torre Agbar, as you say. A few days ago, Meta broke its contract with Telus and, as a result, Telus is leaving Barcelona, leaving around 2,100 people with a more than uncertain employment future: the workers are at home on paid leave while waiting for negotiations to get underway to prevent them from going out on the street. as explained in the information by Carlota Serra Llagostera and Paula Solanas Alfaro in this newspaperAll this has happened without warning, which is the way multinational corporations operate. expado like Telus, which could now simply disappear from Barcelona. Telus had already been fined (40,985 euros) by the Labour Inspectorate due to the effects of its activities on its employees' mental health.
Aside from the labor dispute, in which the unions and the Generalitat will have to intervene, it would be interesting to pause for a moment to consider what kind of society creates a job consisting of reviewing videos in which, according to a former Telus employee, "you can consider yourself lucky if there's only one decapitation." Even more so, in a society where so many people feel the need to record themselves on video while committing an act of extreme violence, with the aim of sharing it on a social network for the whole world to see.
