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.