Content Moderator Sues Reddit Alleging On-the-Job PTSD
2023
A former Reddit content moderator, Maya Amerson, sued the company in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that years of reviewing extreme violence and abuse material caused her PTSD and that management ignored her requests to be reassigned, in a case that became part of a wave of moderator-harm litigation against Big Tech.
What happened
Maya Amerson began working as a content moderator for Reddit in 2018, reviewing violent and disturbing material. According to her lawsuit, after about three years on the job she began suffering panic attacks and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She filed suit against Reddit in San Francisco County Superior Court in January 2023, and the litigation and surrounding coverage continued into 2024 as part of a broader pattern of moderator-harm cases against major technology companies.
The complaint alleges that Amerson witnessed hundreds of acts of extreme and graphic violence, including livestreamed mass shootings, child sexual abuse material, depictions of bestiality, and extreme gore. It claims that Reddit management ignored her requests to move to a position with less exposure to traumatic material, even after she returned from a roughly ten-week medical leave following her PTSD diagnosis, and that supervisors belittled her after she came back, leading to her resignation in 2022.
The case is part of a documented wave of content-moderator lawsuits against Big Tech in which workers allege that constant exposure to the internet's most disturbing material caused lasting psychological harm and that employers failed to provide adequate protections or mental-health support.
The dispute documents the real-world harm to the people who perform the often-invisible labor of keeping the platform usable, and it raises questions about employer duty of care in commercial content moderation.
Impact
The lawsuit brought public attention to the psychological toll borne by Reddit's content moderators and became part of a wider body of litigation pressing technology companies on their duty of care toward workers exposed to extreme material.