How reliably can we measure and diagnose the mental health and well-being of moderators and other workers who review content for a living? And what should we measure in the first place?
In this project, we are working to imagine what it would take to create reliable measures of the psychological impacts of content moderation work that could help test ways to improve the well-being of moderators. As a first step, we’re conducting a systematic review of the different measures that are already being used, both within content moderation and beyond. We hope this review can serve as a starting point to creating survey measures that are more suited to content moderation, in ways that can be adapted for different cultures.
Updates:
- As of February 2025, we have uploaded a preprint of our work onto the arXiv database (Gonzalez, A., Matias, J.N., 2025; arXiv: 2502.00244). This document is under review and has not been peer-reviewed.
Blog Posts:
- Gonzalez, A., Matias, J.N. (2024) Measuring Trauma Among the Internet’s First Responders. Citizens and Technology Lab.
- Matias, J.N., Gilbert, S. (2022) What can Companies Do for Moderator Well-Being? Citizens and Technology Lab.