Episode Three - Outsourcing

Available for over a year

Over 500 hours of video are posted on YouTube every minute. Over 4 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every hour. There are around 500 million posts to X (formerly Twitter) every single day. These numbers are growing by the second. How do you even begin to monitor and police such a relentless avalanche of information? In this new series, Zoe Kleinman journeys into the world of the online content moderators. Big social media platforms rely on automation for much of the work, but they also need an army of human moderators to screen out the content that is harmful. Many moderators spend their days looking at graphic imagery, including footage of killings, war zones, torture and self-harm. We hear many stories about what happens when this content falls through the net, but we don’t hear much about the people trying to contain it. This is their story. The battle against harmful online content is hitting the headlines more every day, even as AI moderation gathers pace. Ironically it needs moderation itself. But a lot of this work happens very far away from the centre of the tech industry in Silicon Valley. In episode three, Zoe discovers how online content moderation has been outsourced to sites across the world, including Kenya, India and the Philippines. Why has content moderation become such a global business? How is imagery from global conflicts finding its way to moderators in East Africa? And how are moderators there challenging the status quo? Zoe speaks to former moderators based in Nairobi and hears how this work has changed their lives. Presenter: Zoe Kleinman Producer: Tom Woolfenden Assistant Producer: Reuben Huxtable Executive Producer: Rosamund Jones Sound Designer: Dan King Series Editor: Kirsten Lass A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4