Margaret was working, quietly, for at least three of the biggest social media companies through a third-party contractor. She’d been one of the first moderators. The human moderators were hired as a stop-gap. For years, the companies had said that soon they would be able to do the moderation automatically, with algorithms, but they still couldn’t. Margaret had spent years looking at terrible videos, longer than most people lasted. She’d got faster and better and it was noticed by one of the people she reported to, and one day there was an email and they wanted to track her for an algorithm and then that project didn’t work but in tracking her they noticed something. Like everyone else, Margaret had abandoned the idea that she could teach the programme to identify content that breached the vague and ever-changing content guidelines, so instead she’d built a page and integrated it into the right-hand side of her screen. The page included a menu of options to help her filter content into silos. She could change the menus as the guidelines changed. The manuals were only occasionally updated, and most of the changes in policy were done on the fly by subject-matter experts and emailed to the moderators.

When she showed her page at the Skype meeting a couple of years ago, it became clear to her that her small piece of programming was the most up-to-date and complete representation of all the current policies. A blush went through her as she realised this might be her big thing. Her excitement was followed almost immediately by the terror of realising she was showing it to them and that she had never asserted any rights over what she’d made, because it had always been just for her so she could look at more videos and images and comments so that she could earn more each hour and win the mathematical game she’d set herself. The approach was new to them. The execution looked sound, they said. Would she like a job?

‘I’d be willing to sell it to you,’ she said. Not sure where the confidence had come from.

‘We don’t want to buy it,’ a man in Toronto said. ‘We could whip this up in no time.’

‘Now that you’ve seen it,’ she said.

‘It’s very similar to what we’ve been working on,’ he said.