Beyond content severity: rethinking psychological impact and wellness care for moderators working with “benign” content

Mitigating harms is the central problem for the field of Trust and Safety. Within this ecosystem, content moderators are the front-facing practitioners dealing with the cumulative, direct and consequential effects of harmful content. They may experience psychological distress and negative cognitive states as a result of bearing the daily burden of interacting with ever-changing content that requires complex review. While exposure to harmful material necessitates wellness care for moderators, the challenges of newer and so-called less severe content, ambiguous policies and fragmented workflows not only negatively affect moderators' well-being but also limit their potential to effectively gatekeep and safeguard online spaces. To meaningfully contain and tackle harm, we need to revisit how content impact and wellness needs are conceptualised. If such groundwork is not laid now, platforms risk falling behind in managing harmful content, putting users and moderators at greater risk while also eroding trust in the system. This chapter integrates the different types of content exposure and harms, and highlights the intricacies and dynamics that impact full-time moderators' well-being, to stimulate collective action for more efficient, effective and psychologically safe content moderation across work types.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Trust, Safety, and the Internet We Share: Multistakeholder Insights on May 22, 2026, available online: http://doi.org/10.1201/9781003621072-24
It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.