Interviews with TikTok moderators in Colombia, contracted via Teleperformance, describe pay as low as $10/day, horrific videos, long hours, high goals, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a documented pattern rather than breaking new ground alone: Facebook's US contractors were reporting PTSD-level harm at roughly $28K/year back in 2019 Verge interviews, and TIME's February 2022 reporting exposed Sama-run moderation conditions in Nigeria at $1.50/hour. In August, Insider found TikTok's MENA moderators earning $2-3/hour with psychological distress — the Colombia findings show the same outsourcing structure following TikTok's user growth into Latin America.
First-order effects
- Teleperformance-contracted moderators in Colombia are directly exposed to traumatic content at pay as low as $10/day under high performance quotas — the named players facing immediate scrutiny are TikTok and its BPO supplier.
Second-order effects
- Every platform relying on outsourced moderation — Facebook included — now faces the same labor-cost-versus-harm comparison across geographies, pressuring BPO firms like Teleperformance to justify per-moderator pricing or absorb compliance costs.
Third-order effects
- If the wage-and-harm pattern holds from the US through Nigeria, MENA, and Colombia, it points toward regulatory treatment of content moderation as hazardous work and accelerated platform investment in automated filtering to shrink human exposure.
The trend: Platform content moderation is consolidating into a global low-cost contracting layer whose labor conditions track each new market TikTok and Meta enter, with regulators increasingly likely to classify the work as hazardous.