‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI; The Guardian, February 5, 2026

Anuj Behal, The Guardian ; ‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI

[Kip Currier: The largely unaddressed plight of content moderators became more real for me after reading this haunting 9/9/24 piece in the Washington Post, "I quit my job as a content moderator. I can never go back to who I was before."

As mentioned in the graphic article's byline, content moderator Alberto Cuadra spoke with journalist Beatrix Lockwood. Maya Scarpa's illustrations poignantly give life to Alberto Cuadra's first-hand experiences and ongoing impacts from the content moderation he performed for an unnamed tech company. I talk about Cuadra's experiences and the ethical issues of content moderation, social media, and AI in my Ethics, Information, and Technology book.]

[Excerpt]

"Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state. Her job is to classify images, videos and text that have been flagged by automated systems as possible violations of the platform’s rules.

On an average day, she views up to 800 videos and images, making judgments that train algorithms to recognise violence, abuse and harm.

This work sits at the core of machine learning’s recent breakthroughs, which rest on the fact that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of a workforce often described as “ghost workers”.

“The first few months, I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I would close my eyes and still see the screen loading.” Images followed her into her dreams: of fatal accidents, of losing family members, of sexual violence she could not stop or escape. On those nights, she says, her mother would wake and sit with her...

“In terms of risk,” she says, “content moderation belongs in the category of dangerous work, comparable to any lethal industry.”

Studies indicate content moderation triggers lasting cognitive and emotional strain, often resulting in behavioural changes such as heightened vigilance. Workers report intrusive thoughts, anxiety and sleep disturbances.

A study of content moderators published last December, which included workers in India, identified traumatic stress as the most pronounced psychological risk. The study found that even where workplace interventions and support mechanisms existed, significant levels of secondary trauma persisted."

Judge Orders Release of 5-Year-Old, Whose Detention Drew Outrage; The New York Times, January 31, 2026

Mattathias Schwartz and Emily Cochrane, The New York Times ; Judge Orders Release of 5-Year-Old, Whose Detention Drew Outrage

The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a blue winter hat and Spider-Man backpack while in the custody of immigration agents, fueled outrage across the country.

"A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of a 5-year-old boy and his father from immigration custody, condemning their removal from their suburban Minneapolis neighborhood as unconstitutional.

The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversize fluffy blue winter hat as he was detained by officers earlier this month, spurred outrage at a moment when many were already incensed by the Trump administration’s immigration tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country. The flood of immigration enforcement officers into Minneapolis, known as Operation Metro Surge, has led to mass demonstrations as well as the shooting deaths of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, at the hands of federal agents.

In a blistering opinion ordering Liam’s release, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.” The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was also arrested and the pair were taken to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio. A lawyer for the family previously said in court filings that Mr. Conejo Arias, who is from Ecuador, had legally entered the country under American guidelines for asylum. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Mr. Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally in December 2024.

In a statement, Jennifer Scarborough and four other attorneys who represent Liam and his father praised the ruling. They said they were now working to quickly reunite the family. “We are pleased that the family will now be able to focus on being together and finding some peace after this traumatic ordeal,” they wrote."

Some Native Americans draw shocked response over contract to design immigration detention centers; AP, December 13, 2025

HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH, JOSHUA GOODMAN AND JOHN HANNA , AP; Some Native Americans draw shocked response over contract to design immigration detention centers

"The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, whose ancestors were uprooted by the U.S. from the Great Lakes region in the 1830s, are facing outrage from fellow Native Americans over plans to profit from another forced removal: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. 

A newly established tribal business entity quietly signed a nearly $30 million federal contract in October to come up with an early design for immigrant detention centers across the U.S. Amid the backlash, the tribe says it’s trying to get out of it...

Tribal Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick promised “full transparency” about what he described as an “evolving situation.” In a video message to tribal members Friday, he said the tribe is talking with legal counsel about ways to end the contract. 

He alluded to the time when federal agents forcibly removed hundreds of Prairie Band Potawatomi families from their homes and ultimately corralled them on a reservation just north of Topeka.

“We know our Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centers,” Rupnick said in the video message. “We were placed here because we were prisoners of war. So we must ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and the trauma once done to our people.”"

‘It’s not going to be some miraculous recovery’: film charts healing of Ukrainian children rescued from Russia; The Guardian, December 11, 2025

Jennifer Rankin , The Guardian ; ‘It’s not going to be some miraculous recovery’: film charts healing of Ukrainian children rescued from Russia

"Between therapy sessions, the children walk golden retrievers, ride ponies in the verdant forest and swim in the Baltic Sea. Therapists hope the natural respite will soothe their souls and help undo some of the trauma of their separation in Russian custody.

The families in this film are unusual: only a minority of Ukraine’s stolen children have been reunited with their parents.

Ukraine’s government has identified 19,546 children who have been unlawfully deported or forcibly transferred to Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The government-backed Bring Kids Back initiative estimates 1,898 have returned from deportation, forced transfers and occupied Ukraine.

But researchers say the true scale of the removals is unclear as Russian authorities erase records and falsify identities. The international criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

In September, Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of a double crime against Ukraine’s children: “Russia first abducted them and deported them, and now it tries to steal everything they have inside – their culture, their character, their bond with family and their identity,” he said.

The documentary, After the Rain, does not tell this political story. The British director Sarah McCarthy, who has Ukrainian heritage, said she wanted to “introduce as many people as I could to these children as children, not as a statistic, not as a political story, just as kids with all their mischief and fun and longing”."

The harrowing lives of animal researchers; Vox, March 3, 2025

Celia Ford, Vox; The harrowing lives of animal researchers

"Alyssa’s experience is anything but rare. Animal research, while largely hidden from public view, is widespread across the life sciences. Animals are used in everything from safety testing for medicines, cosmetics, and pesticides to exploring open-ended questions about how the mind and body work. The drugs we take, the products we use, and the medical breakthroughs we celebrate have been made possible in large part by lab animals and the people who, in the name of science, kill them. 

While it’s difficult to find the exact number of scientists, veterinarians, and animal caretakers working in research facilities, we know that somewhere around 100 million animals — mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, fish, and birds, among others — are used for research and testing worldwide each year. Between 2011 and 2021, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided $2.2 billion in grants for an estimated 4,000 research projects involving animals.

Animal research is traumatic — obviously for the animals unlucky enoughto be involved, but also for many of the humans tasked with harming them. Yet from day one, institutions teach animal researchers that expressing discomfort is akin to weakness, or tantamount to dismissing the value of science altogether. To compete for increasingly rare tenure-track jobs, graduate students and postdocs have no choice but to learn to suppress their emotions and get the work done. Principal investigators, senior scientists who direct animal research labs, often don’t care whether inserting electrodes into a conscious, chronically ill monkey’s brain makes you squeamish. If you can’t handle the heat, they say, get out of the kitchen. 

“The costs have always been out there,” bioethicist and former animal researcher John Gluck said. “They’ve just been completely ignored.”"

Brace Yourself in Act II: Trigger Warnings Come to the Stage; The New York Times, November 18, 2018

Michael Paulson, The New York Times;Brace Yourself in Act II: Trigger Warnings Come to the Stage

"Trigger warnings have, of course, become part of the college experience, surviving mockery and concerns about censorship to win acceptance, if not broad approval. Now demand for those warnings is spreading among the wider public. “People who have grown up with warnings now expect them,” said Becky Witmer, the managing director of ACT Theater in Seattle."

The Bad Parent Caucus; New York Times, February 15, 2018

Timothy Egan, New York Times; The Bad Parent Caucus

"Let me try another take for you bad parents in office. Pretend you live in a pleasant, well-protected community of like-minded people, and you’re in charge. O.K., you don’t have to pretend. And let’s say there was a natural gas leak every three days in one of the homes in that community, a leak that killed entire families.

Your response would be to pray and do nothing. Or to pray and talk about everything except the gas leak. Or to pray and say you’re powerless to act because the gas company owns you. The response of those suffering would be to take control and kick you out. That’s what we have to do, and will, next November."

Trigger Warnings and Intellectual Freedom; The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, Intellectual Freedom Blog, June 13, 2017

Patricia Peters, The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, Intellectual Freedom Blog; 

Trigger Warnings and Intellectual Freedom

"Trigger warnings, initially designed to give advance notice of content potentially detrimental to those who have suffered trauma, have made their way into everyday situations and become code for “stuff that may be offensive or upsetting.” The controversy that continues to surround the use of trigger warnings in educational settings, whether K-12 or university, seems to boil down to whether one uses a narrow definition of the term or a broad definition."

The Coddling of the American Mind; Atlantic, September 2015

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Atlantic; The Coddling of the American Mind:

"Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma."