Interviews with TikTok moderators in Colombia, contracted via Teleperformance, describe pay as low as $10 per day, horrific content, long hours, and more
Content warning: This story contains description of extreme and disturbing violence, suicide, child abuse and cruelty to animals.
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation extends a documented pattern rather than opening a new front: Facebook's US contractors were reporting PTSD and poverty wages back in 2019 interviews with Tampa-area moderators, and TikTok's own outsourced workforce drew similar complaints months ago from moderators across the Middle East and North Africa earning $2–3 an hour. The Colombia reporting adds Teleperformance — one of the largest outsourcing firms serving platforms — to the list of named intermediaries.
What makes the Colombian case significant is the wage floor: $10 per day for exposure to extreme violence, suicide, and child abuse content sits below even the regional benchmarks already on record, and it follows separate reporting that TikTok's third-party moderators were trained using CSAM stored in a widely accessible shared document. The throughline is that trust-and-safety labor conditions are deteriorating as moderation work migrates to cheaper geographies.
First-order effects
- Teleperformance faces direct reputational and client risk: its largest platform customers can now be quoted $10-a-day wages for trauma-exposed work performed under its contracts, pressuring it to raise pay or lose moderation business.
- TikTok's moderators in Colombia are the immediate beneficiaries if anything changes — but right now the reporting hands regulators and labor advocates in Colombia and the EU concrete evidence for inquiries into platform subcontracting.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms with outsourced moderation footprints — Meta most prominently, given its own contractor history — face forced benchmarking: if TikTok is pushed to improve pay and psychological support, the same demands land on every vendor contract in the industry.
- Moderation vendors may respond by shifting work to yet cheaper locations or automating more triage upstream, since each exposé raises the cost of human review in any single country — a dynamic that rewards whoever can price 'cost per verified task' lowest without triggering the next scandal.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across geographies and vendors, content moderation becomes a regulated labor category in its own right — with jurisdictions conditioning platform market access on audited pay, counseling, and exposure limits for contracted reviewers, much as data protection reshaped privacy operations.
- Structurally, the economics push platforms toward a two-tier system: AI filters handling volume at near-zero cost, with scarce, better-paid human reviewers reserved for the hardest cases — shrinking the outsourced moderator workforce even as scrutiny of it intensifies.
The trend: Platform content moderation is consolidating into a global outsourced labor market whose wages and working conditions are being exposed country by country, moving the issue from HR problem toward regulatory target.