Stressed-out Facebook monitors forced to toil in filth: report

The contract workers tasked with keeping Facebook free of disturbing content — including beheadings and child pornography — are often forced to toil in unsafe, filthy working conditions, a new report has found.

Employees at a Tampa, Fla., office of Cognizant, an agency Facebook contracts to police the content on its platform, say their sole office bathroom is often smeared in feces and menstrual blood, while their shared work stations are regularly littered with pubic hairs, boogers, nail clippings and other bodily wastes.

“Every bit of that building was absolutely disgusting,” former employee Melynda Johnson told The Verge. “You’d go in the bathroom and there would be period blood and poop all over the place. It smelled horrendous all the time.”

The office, located in a single-story building that houses roughly 800 workers, only gets cleaned when a representative from Facebook is planning a visit — prompting Cognizant to scrub the place down, the report said.

The filthy working conditions only serve to exacerbate an already stressful job, which requires employees to view child porn and graphic gore on a daily basis.

The Verge first exposed the stresses of the job in a February report that had Phoenix-based Cognizant employees, as well as Austin-based Accenture employees, lamenting that they had taken to smoking weed and having sex on the job, including in stairwells and a parking garage, to relieve the stress.

Wednesday’s report says Cognizant doesn’t always warn prospective employees of just what kind of content they would be helping eliminate from Facebook — instead framing the job as the first step into a career in technology that might end up as a full-time role at the tech giant founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

Shawn Speagle, who agreed to go on the record to talk about his experience at Cognizant, told The Verge that a recruiter told him that he would be helping businesses analyze their online engagement, with some content moderation potentially sprinkled in on the side.

Two weeks into the job, Speagle was told that he would be reviewing graphic violence and hate speech on the platform. The first video he was made to watch was of two teenagers grabbing an iguana by the tail and smashing it on the ground.

“They beat the living s–t out of this thing,” Speagle said. “The iguana was screaming and crying. And they didn’t stop until the thing was a bloody pulp.”

Another former employee said that a recruiter poached him from a normal job with the promise of a regular schedule and performance bonuses. Upon joining Cognizant, according to the report, the employee was made to work nights and never received a bonus.

“We were bodies in seats,” one former employee said. “We were nothing to them — at all.”

Employees of the Tampa office also told of a coworker who had a heart attack at his desk, but no defibrillator was available in the building and he died. That was 2018 and employees told The Verge they are still wondering when they will get a defibrillator.

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Employees are also not allowed sick days and must take personal days when they fall ill. This has led to employees throwing up into garbage cans at their desks to not miss out on any productivity.

In terms of corporate culture, employees consistently compared the Tampa office to a high school, according to the report, with fights and romances being regular occurrences in the office.

Cognizant had to go so far as to institute a dress code to keep employees from dressing provocatively at work, with one email to employees sternly saying “this is not a night club.”

“I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to work there,” a lawyer who represents current and former Cognizant employees said. “It’s a terrible, terrible environment.”

“When the circumstances warrant action on the part of management, we make sure it happens,” Facebook said in a statement, before offering “thoughts” to Keith Utley, the man who died at the office.

Cognizant did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.