There's informed and then there's informed. A few words in a disclaimer presented to you at the last moment is not anything like having full knowledge of the consequences. Long ago I did sysadmin work for an early anything-goes community site, bianca.com, which at the time involved a bunch of anti-abuse work. 20+ years later, there's still shit I can't unsee. Right now I can close my eyes and see my CRT, the room behind it, and the horrible things abusers were posting to make other people feel awful.

And what I had to deal with was a small fraction of the horror now flowing through the ugly parts of social media sites. I don't think written words alone can convey what people doing that work have to deal with, or the possible long-term impacts. At a minimum, for "fully informed" I'd suggest a one-hour documentary that mixes the kind of things they see with interviews from people who ended up with long-term trauma from the work.

And the alternative is what we've done with all sorts of other dangerous work: making it reasonably safe. Off the top of my head, I'd want to see: 1) tools that minimize exposure to harmful imagery (e.g., ML-driven auto-summarization and by-default pixelization), 2) weekly paid sessions with a therapist, 3) a limited amount of time per week dealing with the especially bad stuff, 4) significant, mandatory paid vacation, and 5) mandatory paid sabbaticals for anybody verging on burnout.

Occupationally, mental health isn't fundamentally different than physical health. Nobody reasonable today would deal with radiation or chemical exposure by just having people check the "I might get cancer and that's cool" box when they apply for a job, because we took the problem seriously. We need to do the same with toxic digital media.

Upfront, you mean other than those employees already working.

The more nefarious part of it is that at no point does Accenture suggest that they have any responsibility or will assist with said PTSD. Hell, they even imply that they'll most likely fire you if they find you do have it (one, because the document requires you to tell them, and two, because their supervisors repeatedly pressure therapists at the in house WeCare to disclose that information).

Nope. We should not sacrifice poor people on the altar of quarterly profit goals. Doubly so for companies like Google and Facebook, which are hugely profitable.

There is a sufficient supply of desperate and/or naive people that the market equilibrium is significant and lasting harm to humans. If companies won't solve that problem on their own, then the alternative is regulation. Given the history of physically dangerous jobs over the last century or so, I expect regulation is the likely outcome.

But these are not poor people. At $37k annually they are in the middle third of US income and substantially above the poverty level.

The article linked below profiles a man that "worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does". This indicates to me that all else being equal, they are already offering a premium.

Nor does it sound like he is either desperate or naive. He is well aware of market compensation and he is struggling to decide on the tradeoffs.

Oh? What's that relative to your income? Because my point isn't about absolute dollars. It's about America's long-running tendency toward exploitation of people with less money.

And two years later, they develop PTSD, and look for help with that, at which point Accenture waves this document saying they have absolutely zero responsibility to assist with it.

As someone with personal experience with PTSD, there's no such thing as being informed of the risks up front. No matter how bad it's described to be, it will be worse.

Addressed in linked comment, also by me, also in this thread.