Awe Versus Aww: The Effectiveness of Two Kinds of Positive Emotional Stimulation on Stress Reduction for Online Content Moderators

TL;DR

This study investigates whether positive emotional stimuli during breaks can mitigate stress and emotional distress in online content moderators, revealing that cumulative negative emotions diminish potential benefits.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that positive stimuli during breaks may help reduce moderator stress, but finds that cumulative negative emotions lessen this effect over time.

Findings

Negative emotions accumulate with moderation experience

Positive stimuli have limited impact due to emotional fatigue

Work break strategies should consider emotional fatigue levels

Abstract

When people have the freedom to create and post content on the internet, particularly anonymously, they do not always respect the rules and regulations of the websites on which they post, leaving other unsuspecting users vulnerable to sexism, racism, threats, and other unacceptable content in their daily cyberspace diet. However, content moderators witness the worst of humanity on a daily basis in place of the average netizen. This takes its toll on moderators, causing stress, fatigue, and emotional distress akin to the symptomology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The goal of the present study was to explore whether adding positive stimuli to breaktimes-images of baby animals or beautiful, aweinspiring landscapes-could help reduce the negative side-effects of being a content moderator. To test this, we had over 300 experienced content moderators read and decide whether 200 fake text-based social media posts were acceptable or not for public consumption. Although we set out to test positive emotional stimulation, however, we actually found that it is the cumulative nature of the negative emotions that likely negates most of the effects of the intervention: the longer the person had practiced content moderation, the stronger their negative experience. Connections to compassion fatigue and how best to spend work breaks as a content moderator are discussed.