There have been incidents of Facebook employee dissatisfaction or hardship that call the company's commitment to content reviewers into question, so Facebook announced actions to set and enforce the expectations the company has for its partners.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has substantially scaled its investment in safety and security including rapidly growing the company's content review teams. Facebook now has about 15,000 content reviewers, almost all of whom work not for Facebook itself but for staffing firms like Accenture and Cognizant.

The company’s decision to outsource these operations has been a persistent concern for some full-time employees. After a group of content reviewers working at an Accenture facility in Austin, Texas complained in February about not being allowed to leave the building for breaks or answer personal phone calls at work, a wave of criticism broke out on internal messaging boards.

A Facebook spokeswoman said there has been no change in policies at the facility in Austin, and that it is has been working with Accenture to ensure practices comply with Facebook policies.

Over the years, a stream of media reports have detailed one the Internet’s most dystopian jobs. The most recent example came on Monday, when the Verge published a lengthy account from several Cognizant employees working in Phoenix. They described the trauma of being presented with an endless procession of graphic violence and disturbing sexual activities, and said the restrictive working conditions further aggravated their stress.

In a masssage posted publicly to Facebook’s blog on Monday, written by Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations, Facebook said that outsourcing content review was the only way it could scale quickly enough to meet its needs. “Given the size at which we operate and how quickly we’ve grown over the past couple of years, we will inevitably encounter issues we need to address on an ongoing basis,” Osofsky wrote.

Facebook says it plans to review its contracts with staffing firms, requiring them to have adequate facilities and mental health resources. It also plans to make regular site visits to make sure staffing firms are adhering to the requirements. The company plans to do a wider review of its relationships with contracting firms, starting with a summit with vendors in April. "We will regularly evaluate these roles, our needs going forward, the risks, location, mix of the workforce, and many more areas,” wrote Osofsky.