I also think part of the objection here is around off-shoring. It's similar to other complaints about off-shored jobs: we're farming out unpleasant work to people that get paid less and have much less support (e.g. mental health).
That's an interesting point, and has me wondering something.
If a site like Facebook opened up a volunteer moderator scheme where people could sign up to filter out stuff that broke their rules, would it make things better or worse on a moral level?
What about a US/Europe based agency that did this thing onshore as a contract deal?
Disclosure: I work for but don't represent Google. This is my own opinion.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
As for the volunteer side, it's a really interesting debate. Others in this thread have pointed out Reddit as an example of this in practise. I think the sheer amount of money that Facebook has means that relying on volunteers to (potentially) inflict emotional damage upon themselves wouldn't be a great look.
I think they tend to take an "if in doubt, remove it" approach which basically allows anyone who doesn't like a niche page for whatever reason to have it taken down through sheer attrition, if you report it enough it'll probably go down eventually even for stupid reasons. I actually ended up writing an app to cut Facebook out of our system altogether (it was kind of similar to Yik Yak with a much better moderation system and better anonymity protection - I really can't be arsed to deal with a GDPR lawsuit...) but we couldn't launch it in part because it took me ages to develop as I've since graduated and work as a full-time developer and because coronavirus meant our launch event got cancelled. I might take it live when students go back this year, but I'm concerned that with nothing much going on it'll fizzle and die because there's nothing interesting to post about. It'll all depend on how the Welsh government lift the coronavirus restrictions.