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When a journalist’s post vanishes from Instagram, the instinctive reaction might be to blame Meta, instrumentalising its invisible hand of censorship, silencing dissent with the click of a button. But what if the finger on that button wasn’t corporate, but human?

Recently, a well-known activist journalist complained that Meta had suspended his account over his reporting on Gaza. Understandably, this triggered alarm over freedom of expression and bias in the social media space.

That may well be so, but before we launch another broadside about an all-encompassing conspiracy, perhaps it’s worth pausing to ask: who really makes these decisions?

For, behind every flagged image, every removed reel, every account suspension, sits a person. Not a policy, nor an algorithm. But a poorly paid, overstretched human being, working in outsourced content moderation hubs in places like the Philippines, Kenya, or India.

These are the sweatshops of the digital age. The invisible battalions of content moderators tasked with sifting the gems from the digital detritus. Their job? To spot and remove child abuse, pornography, graphic violence, hate speech, disinformation, and more, all within seconds.

Just seconds is often all the time they get to make the call. But they make these calls while wading through the worst that humanity can upload. Day after day, hour after hour. With minimal support, let alone therapy, and barely a living wage.

It’s not hard to imagine why a post might get wrongly taken down. Reporting of horrific war crimes confused for extremist content. A testimony of suffering mistaken for incitement. A journalistic image caught in a dragnet of violence.

We say “Meta censored me,” but often, it’s a traumatised worker in Nairobi or Manila who made the call — under pressure, without context, and possibly with their own human biases at play. Even if they are treated like them, they are not robots.

If we truly care about justice in the digital space, our outrage should expand beyond just the outcomes that affect us. We should be asking harder questions, not just about how content is policed, but about who we’re asking to police it, under what conditions, and at what cost to their mental health and dignity.

So, to the investigative journalist, so enraged by censorship in these dark times: why don’t you use your investigative skills not just to question the silencing of voices, but also to illuminate the forgotten ones — those quietly drowning in humanity’s digital waste?