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 content and identifying posts that violated the company's terms of use. After three years on the job she began suffering panic attacks and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and she repeatedly sought support from her employer without receiving it. She resigned in September 2022 and filed suit three months later in San Francisco County Superior Court, 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 10-week medical leave following her PTSD diagnosis, and that her supervisors belittled her after she came back to the office, leading to her resignation.
The case cut against Reddit's distinctive moderation model. The platform leans on an army of volunteer moderators, an estimated 21,500 people whose unpaid labor a 2022 Northwestern University study concluded was worth at least $3.4 million to the company annually; volunteers were behind 59% of all content removals in 2021, while paid staff moderators like Amerson handled most other removals to keep the site within the law and Reddit's own content policy. Amerson, notably, was not an outsourced contractor but a direct employee, undercutting the argument that simply bringing moderation in-house protects workers.
Her suit joined a documented wave of moderator-harm litigation against Big Tech. Facebook agreed to a $52 million settlement in 2020 to compensate former content moderators who claimed the work caused psychological harm; YouTube settled a $4.3 million lawsuit from former moderators who said they developed mental health issues on the job; and two former TikTok moderators had sued the previous spring over reviewing videos of bestiality, necrophilia and violence against children. "Generally speaking, content moderation is kind of the new frontier," said Nicholas De Blouw, one of Amerson's attorneys, describing the interest of such cases as "seeing how the law protects people that are in roles that never really existed."
New York University professor Paul M. Barrett, author of a 2020 report on outsourced moderation who has urged platforms to employ moderators directly with proper training and support, said he was "unaware of a major platform doing content moderation well in terms of directly employing moderators who receive proper training, supervision and mental health support." The dispute documents the real-world harm borne by the people who perform the often-invisible labor of keeping the platform usable, and it raises unresolved 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.