>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.
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?
It's not an easy problem.