The men and women tasked with keeping social media safe have been exposed to horrific images and videos for years, a situation that has now sparked a Sh25.9 billion class action lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta and its local agents.

In new details filed in the Employment and Labour Relations Court, the 185 Facebook content moderators have shown how exposure to graphic social media content such as terrorism, child sexual abuse, and murder has exposed them to mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD).

A media who examined 140 content moderators said they were exposed to extremely graphic content on a daily basis including videos of gruesome murders, self-harm, suicides, attempted suicides, sexual violence, explicit sexual content, physical and sexual abuse of children and horrific acts of violence.

"That in my professional opinion, many of them were still in a precarious emotional state despite having stopped Facebook content moderation about a whole year before the examination took place," Dr Ian Kanyanya, a senior medical specialist in psychiatry, said in an affidavit supporting the case...