A total of 344 former employees of CCC Barcelona Digital Services — a company subcontracted by Meta to moderate content on its platforms — have filed lawsuits with the labor courts in Barcelona, demanding compensation of up to €100,000 for the moral and psychological harm they claim to have suffered on the job.
As reported by La Vanguardia and confirmed by news agency EFE through legal sources, the lawsuits target several companies: CCC, its parent company Telus Communications (which acquired CCC in 2020), Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (Meta’s European subsidiary based in Dublin), and Facebook Spain S.L. (the Madrid-based subsidiary responsible for advertising operations). The legal action is being coordinated by Bastet Advocats, which represents more than half of the plaintiffs.
Robert Castro, a lawyer at the firm, told La Vanguardia that this represents an “unprecedented legal action in Europe against Meta for moral and psychological damages.” He added that the number of lawsuits is expected to exceed 500 by September. “They squeeze everything they can out of workers through subcontracted companies, then shut them down and move elsewhere to do it again,” he said.
The plaintiffs worked as content moderators, manually reviewing posts that could violate the rules of platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Each moderator had to examine between 350 and 450 posts per day — many containing highly disturbing material such as suicides, extreme violence, child sexual abuse, animal torture, and beheadings, according to La Vanguardia.
Constant exposure to such content has caused, according to the lawsuits, serious mental health issues among many employees: severe anxiety, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even suicidal thoughts. In some cases, affected individuals required hospitalization or psychiatric care. The claims seek damages for the harm done to their “moral integrity and emotional and psychological health.”
Despite the nature of the work, former moderators argue that the psychological support offered by the company was grossly inadequate. “The well-being services consisted of making you color mandalas,” Castro explained, referring to 45-minute relaxation sessions with no clinical follow-up. Some workers even mentioned that they were shown “cat videos” as a way to relieve stress, according to La Vanguardia.
While the workers were officially employed by CCC, the lawsuits argue that Meta was their true employer, as it set productivity goals, supervised performance, and defined the work protocols and algorithms. This direct relationship is one of the legal pillars underpinning the case.
In April 2025, CCC closed its offices in Barcelona after its contract with Meta ended, resulting in more than 2,000 layoffs. The plaintiffs argue that this move was part of a broader strategy by Meta to outsource labor responsibilities and relocate operations abroad once a subcontractor’s workforce has been exhausted.
The legal battle already has a timeline: the first trials are set to begin in September 2025, with some hearings scheduled as far out as October 2027, according to the parties involved.
This case could set a legal precedent in Europe. In December 2024, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia recognized the mental health disorder of a CCC moderator as a work-related injury, ordering the company to pay €40,000 in damages.
This isn’t the first time Meta has faced such accusations. In 2020, the company was ordered to pay $52 million in the U.S. to over 11,000 moderators following a class-action lawsuit filed in California. However, according to Castro, the scale of the legal action now unfolding in Barcelona is without precedent in Europe.
The case reignites an urgent debate about regulating psychosocial risks in the digital workplace, where many employees are exposed to extreme content with little to no legal protection. “The current system doesn’t protect digital workers,” Castro warned, “and offers no response to those suffering mental health consequences while keeping major tech platforms running.”
