Longitudinal comparison of psychological outcomes of professional content moderators engaged in resilience training program

Introduction Content moderators safeguard the ever-growing online realm by reviewing and filtering out harms, yet are themselves subject to the risk of psychological concerns. Method This study explored the psychological outcomes of content moderators (N = 311) who were offered a resilience training program called The TaskUs Method 2.0 from baseline to 18 months. Participants completed psychometric screeners for resilience, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction, and perceived stress. For the analyses, three timepoints were identified to follow participants across the study period based on their tenure–T0 (0–3 months tenure), T1 (5–10 months), and T2 (11–16 months tenure). Results Findings from the entire sample (regardless of whether participants had data for all three timepoints) revealed that secondary traumatic stress and perceived stress did not differ significantly between timepoints. However, burnout, compassion satisfaction and resilience showed small yet significant decline between T0 and T2. With a reduced sample of only those having data for all three timepoints, similar trends remained although the rate of change from T0 to T1 did not differ significantly from that of T1 to T2 for any of the variables. Discussion Results indicated that participants in the program showed no significant increases in secondary traumatic stress, the main target of the program. Across the different psychometrics, effect sizes were small suggesting that content moderators using the program were not at significant risk for increased psychological distress from content moderation during the study duration. These findings provide a valuable foundation for further refining interventions aimed at content moderators. Future studies may consider experimental and multifactorial designs to delve into therapeutic mechanisms and different types of psychological outcomes.