What?! These people are watching videos of extreme violence, child pornography. You don't think it can "invoke much emotions"?

As long as I can surpress thinking it was a real person, I can watch it without any problem. After many videos, it becomes automatic. Desensitisation is a real problem with watching things from a screen.

But key factor is control, I know what I am going to watch and I can control whether if I want to. Those people on moderation team may not have such situation.

OP is grossly misunderstanding about the long term cost, though. Short term reactions differ from person to person. Some people can quickly associate real things from a video while others don't. It's akin how people can become too mean and insult others online without feeling bad about it.

But things still float around in your head even if you didn't have an immediate reaction. You would remember it some time later or have dreams about it. It will be horrible.

I moderated millions of images myself, plenty of disturbing images, but for my own project and this is why it sounds like bullshit to me.

Also, your sample of experience, n=1, is not great. And genuinely, if you can look at child porn, murder, and other awful, genuinely terrible things all day, every day, and not be impacted, you 100% need to speak to a therapist. That is not the normal human response to trauma.

Well, that's not what moderation is. Most of it is not actually disturbing content. And when you are moderating it, you don't know what kind of content you are looking at, until you get to the point that you do, but that's the point where you have to block it and move on to the next thing. There is not much possibility for emotions. But it is very mentally exhausting work.

Honestly speaking, whether it be videos of extreme content or fluffy rabbits. I will feel absolutely terrible after a few hours of having to watch it. I can't imagine doing that for months.