This paper investigates the ways in which members of the digital gig economy, specifically content moderators and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, experience occupational distress through burnout and vicarious traumatization. In order to understand this, I conducted interviews with 6 individuals who have had significant experience working either as platform workers or content moderators: 4 work primarily on Amazon Mechanical Turk and 2 worked formerly as content moderators full-time, although one active Turk worker (Turker) has done significant amounts of content moderation work on the platform. This work builds upon research done by Sarah Roberts, whose significant contributions to content moderation research guided my approach to interviewing moderators; Manuel Castells, Guy Standing, and David Bell, whose work I use in order to situate content moderation and Amazon Mechanical Turk within the information society, network society and gig economy; and Laurie Anne Pearlman, Grant Devilly, Renee Wright and Tracy Varker, whose research frameworks I use to analyze the ways that my interview subjects fit into, and defy, definitions put forth of vicarious trauma and burnout. My findings are that Amazon Mechanical Turk workers experience burnout and anxiety due to feelings of uncertainty about future financial security. This is caused primarily by the design of the platform and the nature of the piecework which happens on it: workers’ lack of guaranteed compensation, the possibility of being unfairly punished and having their future prospects negatively affected; and the uncertainty of whether enough jobs will be available to pay necessary bills. The Turkers who I interviewed reported that crowd-sourced support systems allowed them to improve these feelings of uncertainty, or precarity. My findings about workers on both platforms who were exposed to graphic content is that little training was given to prepare them for witnessing trauma-inducing content, yet the distress that exposure to this content caused was more a result of pressure to meet production requirements and as a result of burnout in general. This has implications for the ways in which occupational distress affects platform workers in the digital economy.
