Behind the Screen
A review of

Behind the Screen

Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Sarah Roberts • Yale UP • 2019

Human Content Filters

by David Meyer

Professor Sarah T. Roberts explores the seldom-seen world of human content moderators who screen images and text to find and delete offensive, violent, pornographic or terrorist content from social media.

Sarah T. Roberts, a tenured professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, focuses on the moderation of social media content. She reveals how social media’s unseen commercial content moderators edit the material on the internet. Roberts delves into the global impact of their efforts and the often unhealthy effect their work has on their mental state. She depicts a behind-the-scenes, unappreciated army of content moderators who sort out what you see and what everyone else sees, too. 

Content Moderators

The social internet depends on an invisible, poorly paid army of content moderators who regulate the user-generated content that appears on social media platforms. In 2018, Facebook intimated it would staff up to around 10,000 content moderators; Google said it planned to employ double that number.

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