re: #63 Scout

Forgive me, folks, if someone has already posted this link — I haven’t been keeping up on the threads recently.

Anyway, this story from The Verge is both fascinating and saddening.

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THE TRAUMA FLOOR
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

Link

Here’s a long quote from that story:

The job also changed the way he saw the world. After he saw so many videos saying that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack, he came to believe them. Conspiracy videos about the Las Vegas massacre were also very persuasive, he says, and he now believes that multiple shooters were responsible for the attack. (The FBI found that the massacre was the work of a single gunman.)

Randy now sleeps with a gun at his side. He runs mental drills about how he would escape his home in the event that it were attacked. When he wakes up in the morning, he sweeps the house with his gun raised, looking for invaders.

He has recently begun seeing a new therapist, after being diagnosed with PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.

“I’m fucked up, man,” Randy says. “My mental health — it’s just so up and down. One day I can be really happy, and doing really good. The next day, I’m more or less of a zombie. It’s not that I’m depressed. I’m just stuck.”

He adds: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.”