Today I want to take you deeper into the work we’ve done investigating the working conditions of the humans who keep the internet as we know it going. Warning: to talk about it, I need to mention some pretty grim stuff, including extreme violence, suicide and sexual assault.

Our findings have shaken Big Tech companies and prompted thousands of people around the world to empower themselves. We’re incredibly proud of the series, because it has shone a light on a dark truth that most powerful companies would prefer to hide.

If you use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Tinder this affects you. The reason we don’t stumble across videos of Isis members kicking a severed head around like a football or someone wearing a flayed face like a mask is because content moderators watch them first and take them off the platform. On dating apps, safety teams try to keep dangerous people off the platforms.

But our Big Tech reporter Niamh McIntyre has revealed that many of the tens of thousands of content moderators who keep social media safe for you and me face exploitative conditions.

Niamh and the team have spoken to about 100 workers in 12 countries around the world. They found that low pay and poor psychological support means many struggle with depression, PTSD and anxiety. Their ability to have a healthy relationship with the world – where they can eat and sleep properly, and walk around without trauma running through their being – is destroyed. Several told us that they had attempted to take their own lives.

Many of the big social media businesses outsource this work to other companies. Just last week we revealed that one of these outsourcers had moved an operation moderating for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to a secret location in Ghana. Our reporter Claire Wilmot sniffed them out though and revealed the traumatic conditions that workers there work under.

That story is making waves. The non-profit legal action group Foxglove is preparing a legal claim on behalf of the workers. The BBC has since interviewed one of our sources, who tried to end his own life, in part, he told us, because his working conditions pushed him deep into a mental health breakdown. (Meta told us that it takes the support of content reviewers seriously and that its contractors are expected to support their workers.)

The truth is that this has become a feature of our globalised economy. Content moderators are mostly in poorer countries with fewer employment opportunities and they’re working for Silicon Valley behemoths who are making billions from these businesses.

Outsourced Meta moderators in Ghana earn just £65 a month, while the lowest-paid TikTok moderators in Colombia earned £235 a month in 2022. And using outsourcing means the big companies you all know have fewer fingers pointing straight at them. This is a systemic issue.

I asked Niamh to explore what she has learnt over the past two-and-a-half years of reporting and sharing some of the insights she has gained on the “invisible cogs in the vast machinery of Big Tech”.

She’s become a true expert in this area, not through arms-length analysis but by speaking directly with the people in those jobs. She’s listened to their experiences and reviewed payslips, contracts and other documents the tech companies would rather she didn’t have.

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

The green policy of the world’s biggest bank specifies that only 51% of its sustainable investments must have positive environmental or social characteristics. The remaining 49% can be invested without such restrictions.

Find out more

We recently uncovered how JPMorgan funneled a quarter of a billion dollars of “sustainable funds” to a mining company causing devastation in South Africa.

As a result of the company’s activities, water supply has been seriously contaminated in some areas – leaving locals with practically undrinkable water.

Read more here.

It’s not just US meat we need to worry about

Keir Starmer is obviously celebrating the US-UK trade deal as a win. There are several parts of the deal to scrutinise, but I want to look at just one: food. Starmer has promised not to weaken UK food standards on imports and no “red lines” were crossed apparently. Top marks for bravado, but how satisfied should we be?

Preventing the UK importing hormone-injected beef and chlorinated chicken from the US is only one issue. The much bigger battle seems already lost: the rampant spread of US-style mega farms in the UK, damaging the environment and running the risk of making us all sicker.

TBIJ has long reported on how some of the UK’s most beautiful areas are being taken over by enormous sheds holding hundreds of thousands of chickens. Pigs and dairy cows are also being reared on a massive scale. Across the country hundreds of these new farms have popped up.

Way back in 2017, the then environment secretary Michael Gove promised to protect the environment and food standards by stopping the spread of US-style megafarms.

"One thing is clear: I do not want to see, and we will not have, US-style farming in this country,” he told parliament. The future for British farming is in quality and provenance, maintaining high environmental and animal welfare standards."

Too bad that even then intensive farming was booming.

Just last week we revealed that the government was subsidising intensive poultry farmers near the Wye and Severn Valley, despite the water and air pollution brought on by these farms.

Last year we also exposed how the US food giant Cargill was slaughtering cattle that were contaminated with powerful antibiotics. That’s a real problem because the overuse of these antibiotics, the kind that are essential to save humans when they’re really ill, means that more powerful illnesses can develop and spread.

This is the true red line for the UK when it comes to animal farming – and it’s already been crossed. So talk of upholding standards is a bit of a red herring.