Moderators who had to view child abuse content sue Microsoft, claiming PTSD | Hacker News Reader

Moderators who had to view child abuse content sue Microsoft, claiming PTSD

theguardian.com

12 pointsxmpir8 comments

Duplicate of what was already posted 10 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378346

Since they did have the choice to switch jobs, I think the most they should be able to claim is councelling fees.

They can always claim that they were told it's not that bad and that they did get company counseling but it was not sufficient and the actual dangers were undersold. This paragraph makes me think there's actually a decent case:

"""Program authorities advised the workers to take walks and smoke breaks and suggested Blauert play video games to manage his symptoms, the complaint said. Later, however, his supervisors allegedly gave him a poor evaluation for “lack of production and too much time playing video games”."""

Very good use case for machine learning. I don't know what tech is used but prescreening with ML should already be quite helpful if you don't want to rely on it fully.

It is just not allowed for an employer to offer a job that will seriously damage employees' health. It doesn't matter if employees have the choice to switch jobs or even if they let them sign some waiver to acknowledge they accept the health damage. Laws have been put into place to prevent this, basically to protect naive employees against themselves.

One possibility is that the employees are looking for easy money. Maybe they think it'll be easy to shock the jury into ruling in their favor.

I wonder if it makes sense to hire pedophiles to do this job. Especially if this lawsuit holds, pedophiles wouldn't be able to make similar claims. And you already need security measures to prevent them from stealing customer emails and such.

The other solution is to push more of this work onto a computer program, but no matter how well that works they'd probably want to have a human check it before sending customer data to the FBI.

At the very least, if it's a real problem they should probably screen people for having thick skins and make them sign a waiver or something.

I wouldn't be too dismissive of their claims - see this [1] long article on the subject, and particularly this [2] HN thread.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11502242

> pedophiles wouldn't be able to make similar claims

I'm not sure that's true.

yep, seen the first pic, if the job was so disgusting he should pop up and asking for a relocation or just quit and search for something else. anyway ... the opportunity of a millionaire lawsuit to Microsoft is always appealing, apparently

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