Grindr Content Moderators Are Facing A Mental Health Crisis, Says New Report
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According to a new report, outsourced workers who perform content moderation for popular dating apps, including Grindr, are facing a mental health crisis due to poor labor conditions and a lack of mental health resources.
For its report “Behind Every Swipe: The Workers Toiling to Keep Dating Apps Safe,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), a non-profit independent news outlet, spoke with 40 current and former workers from an array of dating apps, including Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr. Many interviewees performed labor for companies headquartered in the United States through third-party firms based in Honduras, the Philippines, and Brazil — countries that offer labor at a lower cost.
According to ‘Them’, the workers TBIJ interviewed detailed the mental health challenges that come with performing content moderation, which include “symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.” They told the news outlet that the third-party companies they work for are doing little to address those struggles. Ana, an employee at the staffing company PartnerHero who spoke using a pseudonym, said her work for Grindr included wading through user reports of sexual assault, homophobic violence, child sexual abuse, and murder. According to the report, when she did leave her job, she was left unable to work for months afterward and received a PTSD diagnosis.
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One Honduras-based interviewee who did content moderation for Grindr said that she and her colleagues were exposed to images of child sexual abuse via an attachment from a user. “We had three people just leave that day … because they could not handle it,” the worker said.
In total, TBIJ said it spoke to 14 former Grindr moderators, noting that “virtually all” faced traumatic conditions, with one interviewee saying they attempted suicide multiple times while working at the company.
Aside from the disturbing content they are required to sift through, these outsourced workers also complained of burnout, given the grueling pace they are reportedly asked to maintain. Workers on Grindr’s PartnerHero team reportedly had to maintain a 92% or greater “quality score,” a measure of their decision-making, or face termination. According to the report, Ana said PartnerHero “tried to fire her” when she was not able to meet productivity standards even though she was seriously ill at the time.
“Sometimes we made mistakes that we were not [accounted]] for, or [that] could have been avoided if we had more people,” one former content moderator, who did work for Grindr, said in the report.
Workers said that this environment is partially responsible for a huge backlog of user reports.
“We respect how difficult the role of a content moderator can be, and have worked in collaboration with PartnerHero over the course of our relationship to consistently improve processes, training, and support for the moderation team,” Grindr told TBIJ in a statement.
According to the report, Grindr began working with PartnerHero in 2017 to add customer support staff. While PartnerHero always did some user safety work, the third-party company took on “the bulk” of Grindr’s content moderation over time. PartnerHero workers doing content moderation for Grindr in Honduras told TBIJ that there was little mental health support available for staff until 2020. That year, according to the workers, another third-party contractor was brought in to provide therapy, and PartnerHero added subsidized mental health services to its health insurance plans. However, TBIJ noted that several workers who were hired after these benefits were introduced said they were not made aware that they even existed.
According to TBIJ, Grindr has downsized its own internal trust and safety team, with one employee telling the news outlet that “preventing banned users from getting back on Grindr and reducing moderators’ exposure to distressing content such as child abuse material had been deprioritized in favor of cost-cutting and increasing revenue.”
Working conditions within Grindr itself made the news earlier this year when the company announced a strict return-to-office policy that would require employees to work from either Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago. The announcement came as the company’s workers were moving to unionise. (Grindr claimed the policy was not retaliatory, saying the union’s claims to that effect had “no merit.”) Almost half of Grindr staff left rather than comply with the RTO plan, as CNN reported.
“[Grindr]’s no longer a safe app,” Joseph, a safety worker who recently left Grindr, told TBIJ. “It wasn’t a safe app to begin with. We were begging for help, and just never received it.”
In a statement to TBIJ, Grindr said, “Our safety and legal teams, which are sufficiently resourced, continue to review complex user reports as necessary.”
Read related myGwork articles here:
Grindr Loses Nearly Half Its Staff After Issuing Return-To-Office Ultimatum
Grindr: 25% Of Users Are On The App To Network, Company Says
Grindr To Become A Public Company
Dating App Grindr Is Set To Release Its Own TV Series
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