The ghost of content moderation is back to haunt Cognizant

At least 14 former employees have separately sued Cognizant in a Florida court this year, accusing the Nasdaq-listed technology services company of wilfully concealing the mental health harm posed by content moderation work. All employees have sought a jury trial and damages of over $75,000 each.

This is the first time Cognizant is facing lawsuits over its Facebook contract, which ended in 2020. Significantly, almost all compare the company's practice with how tobacco firms failed to disclose the health-related problems of cigarettes in the past.

Mental health harm

The lawsuits come at a time Cognizant has trailed its peers and seen a CEO change. Last January, the board sacked CEO Brian Humphries and hired former Infosys Ltd executive S. Ravi Kumar in his place.

Also read: Behind Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries' abrupt ouster

“Cognizant misrepresented to Plaintiff and other applicants the extreme nature, high volume and severity of the content they would be reviewing. Cognizant also misrepresented the risk of psychological harm it knew the work of content moderation of this nature posed to Plaintiff and the other applicants," said Derek Tyrone Anderson in his complaint filed in January.

“Like the tobacco companies, Cognizant took on the duty to disclose by promising to share information regarding the injurious nature of content moderation with new hires, including Plaintiffs. Cognizant breached that duty when operational leadership, including Operations Leader Terry Oliver and the supervisors who reported to Oliver, deliberately misrepresented that information to Plaintiff," said Lameka Dotson in her complaint.

Mint has seen copies of all complaints.

Removing vile content

The petitioners say they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as their work entailed watching and manually removing vile content, including murders, rapes and abuses. They say Cognizant failed to provide them a safe work environment.

Printy Law Firm, a Tampa, Florida-headquartered law firm, represents all 14 complaints.

An email sent to Gary Printy, Partner at Printy Law Firm, on 18 May seeking comment remained unanswered. Dennis Waggoner, partner at Hill Ward Henderson, the law firm representing Cognizant, did not offer comment. An email sent to Cognizant remained unanswered.

“When individuals file lawsuits a few years after an event, it could mean one of the two things. First, individuals have more information on the event and hence they see merit in the case. The other thing is that the aggrieved employees believe they have precedence over a development which they can leverage," a former Cognizant executive said on the condition of anonymity.

“The outcome of these cases could have a bearing on other content moderation work done by Cognizant for YouTube," the executive added.

Cognizant counts YouTube's parent Alphabet as one of its large customers, estimated to account for over $600 million in annual revenue.

Also read: Not working from office might lead to job loss, Cognizant tells employees

The engagement with Meta has become a lightning rod for the Teaneck, New Jersey-headquartered company, since it started offering engineers to scrub through its social media feed of violent content in late 2017. According to two executives privy to the work, the Meta deal was worth almost $250 million in annual revenue for Cognizant, which employed over 650 employees for content moderation. But soon, this partnership ran into trouble, as people deployed for the task began voicing the psychological harm caused by the work.

The Selena Scola case

In September 2018, Selena Scola, who had worked as a content moderator for Facebook at a Florida-based staffing firm PRO Unlimited, filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook. Two years later, in 2020, Meta agreed to pay $52 million to compensate over 14,000 people who worked as content moderators hired by third-party contractors, including those hired by Cognizant.

Also read: Cognizant to cut 13,000 jobs, exit some businesses

In October 2019, while declaring its results for the July-September period, Cognizant said it would end its partnership with Facebook over the coming months as the work did not align with its “long-term strategic vision". The deal ended in 2020.

Since ending its partnership with Meta, Cognizant has struggled to back-fill this loss of $250 million in annual business, resulting in the company ending with $19.35 billion in revenue last year, a decline of 0.4%.