Former TikTok content reviewers file lawsuit over California labor law violation

Two former TikTok content moderators filed a lawsuit against TikTok and ByteDance, alleging that the companies failed to provide appropriate support to help workers cope with mental trauma caused because of prolonged exposure to extreme content.

Both plaintiffs Reece Young and Ashley Velez were on contract with TikTok through third-party companies - Atrium, a New York-based company, and Telus International, a Canadian firm, respectively. They had to engage themselves for 12 hours during workdays to remove objectionable content deeply. The kind of content they had to filter out included suicide, murder, child sexual abuse, torture, rape, beheadings, etc., and the plaintiffs were also exposed to conspiracy theory and hate speech, which again impacted their mental well-being negatively.

Velez and Young are trying to obtain class-action status for their lawsuit, alleging that these companies violated California labor laws as they failed to provide appropriate support to mitigate the psychological trauma due to their exposure to offensive content. The lawsuit also claims that the companies pushed the content moderators to review and remove high volumes of unfiltered and disgusting content and alleviated the psychological trauma by forcing them to sign an NDA that legally binds them from discussing any of it with others.


A class-action lawsuit will allow other TikTok content moderators to join the lawsuit and claim to have been harmed by the companies’ policies and practices. The lawsuit also mentions that these companies did not take any measures to help contractors deal with their psychological trauma in spite of being aware of the psychological risks the content reviewers were exposed to.

The recent TikTok lawsuit follows a class-action lawsuit against Facebook that the same legal team had filed in 2018, and the company settled the same for $52 million by paying 11,000 content moderators who struggled to deal with the psychological trauma of reviewing and removing extreme, disgusting content.