Sarah Lewitzka
I am a first year Clinical PhD student in the Forensic and Clinical Cognition Lab. I joined the Lab in 2020 for my third-year placement and found this experience to be incredibly valuable, leading me to continue in the Lab throughout 2021 as a volunteer research assistant. I then completed the Summer Research Award Program (2021–2022), before undertaking my honours program with the Lab. My honours thesis aimed to investigate whether the type of decisions content moderators make in their role increases the negative impact of viewing morally disgusting images.
Content moderators view hundreds of graphic images a day to ensure content that violates social-media guidelines is either removed or flagged with a warning. However, frequent exposure to such content is distressing, anxiety inducing, and can even lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. Thus, my current research aims to build upon my honours findings by examining a broader range of risk factors associated with content moderation and evaluating strategies that can mitigate these factors, in the hopes of creating safer work for content moderators.