This feels like an externality that needs to be internalized by these platforms.
It shouldn't be legal to destroy people's minds, then drop them back off into society with no help.
If you want to run a massive platform where anyone can upload anything, then you should have to pay for it, at least insofar as financially supporting the potentially life-long therapy someone is going to need after doing a moderation job.
One of many, many, externalities these platforms create, I realize.
>If you want to run a massive platform where anyone can upload anything, then you should have to pay for it, at least insofar as financially supporting the potentially life-long therapy someone is going to need after doing a moderation job.
But this is so tricky though, isn't it? Anyone can run a media sharing platform. Hacker News is a media sharing platform. Mandating these sort of laws...makes the Internet less free.
The same sort of horrifying content that is moderated out today could have just been easily been uploaded to the BBS's and phpbb's of the early 90s-2000s. Does it make sense to make Facebook pay for lifetime care of moderators? Sure - they make billions of dollars - but what about a regional car club forum, or a subreddit about cat pictures? Should reddit be paying anyone who makes and runs a subreddit because they will inevitably have to moderate something grotesque?
I'm thinking of this in the context of being an employer. As in, if you're going to hire people to be moderators, you can't destroy them as human beings.
If platform companies are responsible for the content on them, and they are hiring (even indirectly) people to moderate the content, and that content harms the moderators, then the company should be responsible for their care. Like, workplace disability, basically.
Isn't this the same risk anyone enlisting in the military also runs?
Still, I agree - it would be a lot easier to avoid these awful posts if people had to pay to be on the platform. It wouldn't be perfect of course, but it at least provides a barrier to entry and a slightly harsher consequence if you forfeit your membership fee when banned for inappropriate content.
Isn't this the same risk anyone enlisting in the military also runs?
Yes, and we've been slowly forcing the military to acknowledge to own up to that. When PTSD was first recognized (as shell shock in WWI), the initial response of the (UK) military was to declare these people physically healthy and return them to the front, or execute them for desertion. I'd say the armed forces have come a long way since.
It shouldn't be legal to destroy people's minds, then drop them back off into society with no help.
If you want to run a massive platform where anyone can upload anything, then you should have to pay for it, at least insofar as financially supporting the potentially life-long therapy someone is going to need after doing a moderation job.
One of many, many, externalities these platforms create, I realize.