68% of Tech Employees: Violent Content Needs More Moderation on Social Media

Depending on your perspective, violence in the media, including online content, is a huge problem or it’s more of an accepted but obnoxious aspect of the digital age. We’ve all heard of the research studies focused on exposure to violence in movies and TV shows. Many of us might agree that it isn’t healthy to consume too much of it, particularly when it comes to young children who should not be exposed to it at all.

With the explosive growth of wi-fi enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets there are more digital screens than ever.  We can consume online content almost at any time and wherever we are. This new reality, when combined with the vast array of content types, means some of it contains violence. Simply put, exposure to violent media and its’ potential impact is a very real issue.

We decided to survey a number of employees at tech companies with platforms that include some violent content. They were: Reddit, Twitter, Google and Facebook.

The question asked, ‘Has Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit and Twitter done enough to stop the spread of violent content online?’ Respondents could select either Yes or No.

There were 3, 074 respondents in total. Nearly 68% or 2,087, selected the No option and 32% or 987, chose Yes. The survey was run from March 15 to March 18, 2019.

Google employees, Facebook employees, Youtube employees, Reddit Employees Twitter Employees, Tech Industry, Content moderation, Social Media, Tech Regulations, Big Tech, Silicon Valley, Big Tech Companies
Of the individual companies, the Reddit employees had the highest Yes response rate, which was 69.23% and 30.77% chose No. Next came Facebook with a 63.87% Yes rate and 36.13% selecting No. Twitter’s Yes rate was a little less at 62.5% and No was 37.5%. Google’s Yes rate was slightly lower at 59.86% who chose Yes and 40.14% that chose No.

These are fascinating results. The tech workers we surveyed overall indicated the four companies are not doing enough to stop the spread of violent online content. The employees at these companies who participated in the survey responded differently.

Violence-related discussions on Blind

About Blind

At Blind we’re on a mission to bring transparency to the workplace. Transparency results in voice and voice results in change, often for the better. That’s why we created Blind, an anonymous social network for the workplace. Our user base includes over 50,000 employees from Microsoft, 35,000 from Amazon, 13,500 from Google, 10,500 from Facebook, 9,500 from Uber, 8,000 from Apple, 6,000 from LinkedIn, and 5,000 from Salesforce, just to name a few. With such a large user base of tech professionals, it makes it easy to quickly poll these employees about important and popular topics, such as this.