Videos of murders and suicides are posted regularly on Facebook, and now the company has vowed to keep that kind of content off the site. In a recent post, Mark Zuckerberg said his company will hire 3,000 content moderators this year to, "help us get better at removing things we don't allow on Facebook like hate speech and child exploitation." He added that they will also work with law enforcement to help Facebook users, "because they're about to harm themselves, or because they're in danger from someone else." What remained unsaid in his post is where exactly these 3,000 new moderators will come from.

Zuckerberg and Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg may boast about all these hires, but there are no job openings for "content moderator" on the Facebook Online Operations website. The company has remained mum when asked by reporters whether these jobs will be in-house or outsourced. The reality is that these new helpers who will keep Facebook safe probably won't work there. They will be doing some of the company's most harrowing work without the benefits of Facebook's health care plan or job security.

For years now, Facebook has outsourced content moderation to staffing companies whose contractors spend all day looking for offensive or illegal content. Often these content moderators do their jobs as task work from home or in cubicles from large call centers around the world. Many are in the Philippines; in interviews with UCLA information studies professor Sarah Roberts and journalist Adrian Chen, they report that burnout is high because of the horrific videos and images they look at. They also report feeling like exiles from the companies whose work they do.

Perhaps the best representation of what it's like to have one of these jobs comes from an art project called Dark Content by Eva and Franco Mattes, shown in galleries last year, which consisted of interviews with dozens of content moderators. Because companies demand that content moderators not discuss their jobs, the Matteses kept their informants anonymous by altering their voices and converting their faces into digital avatars. Some describe how they never know what company is sending them requests for moderation, keeping the entire transaction anonymized.

One says that he couldn't stop crying after watching a series of videos where a man tortured cats to death. Another said he had to watch a video where a politician killed himself during a speech. Several mentioned bestiality videos as a recurring problem. Still another, who admitted that he had worked at Vimeo, said that he and other content moderators were often asked to remove political content to show "patriotism."

Over and over in these accounts, moderators talk about developing PTSD and having nowhere to turn. They aren't allowed to discuss their work due to NDAs and threats of being fired. Because they are mostly contractors or part-timers, they have no health insurance that might pay for a few therapy sessions. In one of the Matteses' videos, a content moderator said that his cubicle started to feel like a "prison" or "hell." Another told journalist Chen that he had to quit when he realized he was drinking to medicate himself.

In his post, Zuckerberg said the new round of hiring represents "investing in more people," but it's unclear what kind of investment he's talking about. Will these be more outsourced content moderators, without any support to deal with the horrors of their jobs? Or will they be hired into Facebook and made true members of the company's team?