Producing Precarity: Commercial Content Moderation in the Spotlight at ATIM 2026

Commercial (or industrial) content moderators, the people who review and remove harmful material from social media platforms, work in some of the most precarious conditions in the digital economy. In many cases they are proximate to modern slavery.

At All Things in Moderation (ATIM) 2026, we hosted a session with Aapti Institute, a Bangalore-based tech policy research firm, examining exactly what those conditions look like and what platforms, governments and companies owe the people doing this work.

The session opened with a presentation from researchers Sreya Nair and Ritvik Gupta mapping how value and accountability move through the content moderation supply chain. Platforms and lead firms sit in the Global North, vendors and third-party firms sit in the Global South, and content moderators absorb the outputs at the end of a chain built on multi-tier subcontracting.

Their framing named four key costs that moderators carry:

• routine exposure to graphic and traumatic material

• mental health support that exists as a wellness perk rather than an enforceable right

• active silencing through non-disclosure agreements; and

• algorithmic management systems that shape almost every part of a moderator's working day, including whether they have access to work at all.

The discussion that followed brought two former content moderators based in Kenya into direct conversation with a researcher who has studied moderation decision-making in outsourced Indian workplaces, under Chatham House Rules.

In keeping with that privacy commitment, we're not naming or quoting panellists individually here. What we can say is that the conversation moved from diagnosis into specifics: how consultation between management and workers can function as a way to identify and remove people who raise concerns, how pay for the same work can differ by an order of magnitude between global north and global south workers, and how productivity and accuracy targets push moderators toward efficient decisions rather than accurate ones, because the fastest path through a queue is often the safest path for keeping a job.

We also discussed proposals for reform. Recurring themes included:

• statistical transparency (platforms disclosing real numbers on how many moderators they employ, what they spend on trust and safety, in-house and outsourced, and the tasks those moderators conduct)

• career mobility for moderators rather than a ceiling that stops at team lead

• respect for the sophistication of the labour performed;

• resilience testing and clearer disclosure at the point of recruitment so people know what the job actually involves; and

• mapping the supply chain so responsibility can't dissolve into ‘it's a vendor relationship.’

We also discussed the challenge within global north governments and companies that sign on to modern slavery conventions and supply chain governance commitments, while building businesses on platforms whose outsourced moderation work comes uncomfortably close to meeting that definition.

This is exactly the kind of session ATIM exists to host, and exactly the kind of follow-through Aapti Institute does well.

Thank you to Sreya Nair, Ritvik Gupta and Aditi Shah, to the panellists who spoke from direct experience and expertise, and to everyone who participated in the rich discussion.

Read Aapti Institute's own recap of the session, including a link to their reflections document: Producing Precarity: A Session at ATiM 2026.