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The In-House Decency Patrol At Facebook
theodp writes "How'd you like a job where you get fired if you DON'T view porn at work? Newsweek reports on Facebook's internal police force of 150 staffers who are charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. Part hall monitors, part vice cops, the $50,000-a-year 'porn cops' also keep Facebook safe for corporate advertisers."
there are people who get PAID to view porn?!
How do I apply and am I allowed to save the images to my computer?
signature is pants
First it's the Sweedish tax collectors, now facebook! I am in the wrong line of business!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I wouldn't mind getting paid to look at some porn with that chick.
They pay 150 people $50k a year to do this when if they promised people a few hundred Texas Hold 'Em chips per report they could have millions doing it for free.
As exciting as this seems at first, I'm sure it gets real old real fast, and isn't nearly as cool as it seems.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
For such a boring job.
How do I apply and am I allowed to save the images to my computer?
Neither your hard drive, nor your [censored}, are big enough.
They don't want people who will end up filing for workers' comp for "tennis elbow".
I hate how incredibly sexist the filtering is. Both sexes (generally) have a pair of nipples that appear very similar, so for one pair to be fine for prime-time television, and another pair to be fined for a fleeting appearance on TV seems very silly.
It isn't the shape of the female breast that is the issue, as a picture of a model wearing a skimpy swimming suit would pass. Male nipples? Also just fine.
Female Nipples? WHOAH, STOP THE PRESSES!
(Even if the nipple is currently feeding a child)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I'm aware that the advertizing is targeted, but all I ever see are ads for dating sites or russian mail-order brides.
Oh, and those "free" credit report companies, who make the russian mailorder bride people look reputable.
Also, isn't facebook losing money hand over fist anyway? They'd probably do better if they moved to a subscription model that let you look at other user's porn.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Not only would the questionable perk of viewing porn and other amusing things become boring after constant exposure, you get to wade through the eyesore garbage people post on their page as well. Sounds like an easy gig, but one can imagine that there is a constant mountain of paperwork and reports to fill out. If you ask me it smacks of a highly paid glorified clerk job.
There are ads on facebook?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The fact that these guys actually exist make me glad i'm not on facebook. Ya know facebook pretends to care about privacy all that but how can they keep that up when they have 150 paid staff who'se job it is to snoop through your stuffs?
Wait till they find pictures of their mothers on my page!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I've worked in internet advertising and know how important ads are to many useful services AND that they often contain info I actually want to see and click (job openings, products that interest me, etc.).
So while I use adblock, I have very limited block list that I have personally made. It consists of: Ads that blink so much they literally hurt your eyes, ads that very clearly lie ("you are millionth visitor" or adult friend finder ads) and... that's pretty much it. The list has gotten quite long but still only contains those.
For long, I tried to struggle not to add facebook ads to the list. However, all the ads I am getting are VERY deceptive. There are numerous, poorly translated "[celebrity name] IQ is 136, test your's!" (sometimes using a friend's name instead of celebrity's) or "[Friend's name] has done [insert new thing], try it out" when they haven't... And then there are all the ads designed to look just like facebook buttons so that you would accidentally click them...
Though I have worked in the business, I have never seen any other site so consistently filled with that shady ads. Even porn sites mostly have real poker ads. Google has MUCH stricter policies on ads allowed. I can't imagine this kind of ad policy being good for FB in the long run.
Had this job too at a very large software company when debugging the browser code. It was the darn pron videos that would crash, or some badly formed html at the pron sites.
We had to get the employee handbook changed to exempt us from any issues.
I then helped write the nntp client, which only increased the amount of porn.
Its "$50k a year" because say if a pattern could be proved, that they were deleting say "minority-porn" preferentially, acting as employees, then the corporation's entire assets are at-risk.
Because with these paid workers, things make so much more sense.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Can't the Electrician'sw Union get these guys hooked up and organized? $50,000 is no living wage! Once they get senority they don't have to look at the boring stuff either, only the pretty erotica ;)
Home of The Suki Series
Two good reasons for boycotting Facebook: what they censor and what they don't.
Yes, I'd say something is wrong with someone, who thinks breastfeeding is obscene.
It has been this way for hundred thousands of years and without it, we wouldn't be here.
So suddenly it's obscene. uh. lol.
He got transferred to the Vice Unit which seen like a demotion for a homicide detective. His explanation was that no police officer spent more that eighteen months in the Vice Unit because it tended to corrupt the offices and turn them into the criminals they where fighting.
If this holds true, and I have mo reason to doubt my former neighbor, will this be a temporary assignment? Or will we start seeing these employees start posting there own girl meet donkey videos?
--
The American Form of Government
The social mores against female breast nudity are some of my favorite mores. With out it breasts would lose some of there excitement.
unless you are trying to explain how to get a baby to latch there is little reason to have pictures of a woman breast feeding.
You are one of these internet nutjobs that wants to repeal both the law against public indecency and go against our social norms, just because this one doesn't suit you.
Come up with something better or get over the fact that we hold breasts to be sacred so that we may profane them. This situation, by the way, benefits both males and females.
How difficult is it to get a simple breast-cloth to cover yourself out of respect for those around you? Sex is as beautiful and natural as breast feeding and should also not be performed in public.
I had the job ages ago of invesitgating complaints about a large dutch ISP's servers and user accounts content. If you send a mail that on our network there was inappropriate content, then I investigated and took appropriate action.
Do not think this inappropriate content is restricted to some David Hamilton pics ("this content is legal with in the jurisdiction of the account it is hosted from")or even the early ancestors of "two girls and a cup" ("No laws are broken").
Times might have changed a bit. The internet is a bit less of a wild west zone and facebook might not attract the very worsed of content as it is by its nature linked to your indentity but then, so was your IP to your account in my time.
I quit after a few months despite a fairly high salary because there is only so much child porn, dead bodies or both you can look at.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is news to me. Why would you actually want to allow anyone to track you, you're just asking for trouble.
I bet after being required to look at porn all day every day they feel mentally scarred and get really turned off of sex in their own lives.
can't some bright guy write a script to collect all the all the images uploaded every day and put into a "contact sheet"... you could look at a whole swath of images in one fell swoop.. I wonder how many images do they get a day?
http://www.htcherocentral.com
You are still in school, right?
Yes, because, mr. great economist, if everyone was skilled, everyone would command large sums of money for their work.
you would like to think that way wouldnt you...
if all have skills then the demand would drop because of the over-supply of skilled labor.
because, mr. great economist, if everyone was skilled, no one would command large sums of money for their work.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
It's revealing that the porn patroller featured in the article -- a fellow whose job is to view photos all day and press "yes" or "no" buttons -- is a Stanford graduate.
This illustrates how many people apply to work at Facebook, and how hard it must be to get a job there. This guy got his degree from Stanford and took a job that could easily be outsourced to Mechanical Turk -- just to work at Facebook.
For what it's worth, the $50K salary quoted might sound like a lot to those of you in the flyover states but it's pretty dismal by Bay Area standards. My first job out of college in the Bay Area, by comparison, paid $30K -- and that was 20 years ago.
I hope the guy is buried in options.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Male nipple aren't that exciting and don't seem to be a primary atractor to female human, but the contrary, female niplle seem to be a very primary sexual arouser for female human especially with rising size, or the puffing of the nipple (showing sexual receptivity). So your point is pointless.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
When I worked at Xoom.com (of the "free homepages" fame ala geocities) over 10 years ago, we had several people on staff with the same job. But instead of 'porn cops' we jokingly referred to them as 'porn whackers'. The biggest reason for having people paid to go through this stuff was to remove kiddie porn and report it to the FBI.
This topic actually got me onto facebook to search for some old pictures... turns out my now x-girlfriend's topless pictures are still there several years later after being posted (and yes, they have always been set to publicly available, we fought about it when she posted them since she's one of those women's rights... people). Unless there is something seriously incompetent about the employees or the algorithm presenting them with information to judge, I don't think they care about nipples unless someone specifically complains about them.
most profiles these days are private anyway. if you don't like someone's pictures there's the delete button. don't want to see a human breast? don't go snooping around public profiles for a thrill
The post title says it all.
There's a pretty funny film with an exaggerated version of this sort of thing as a backstory: The Adjuster.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I had to get a waiver from Legal so that I could download porn without repercussions. A part of the system I was building at the time had a non-recursive web crawler in it, and it did not discriminate what it was downloading. If the input contained kiddie porn, it would download that as well. Thankfully, my work did not require me to view any of that stuff.
A good friend of mine works on spam detection in Live Search. Studying porn, malware, etc. sites is a job requirement for him, and nothing is exempt.
Women are filthy creatures who should hide themselves in shame.
I've got room for about 30 or so slim ones in my living room.
I'll do my part to keep them out of view of society!
. . . the $50,000-a-year 'porn cops' also keep Facebook safe for corporate advertisers.
They wouldn't give a ripshit otherwise. It's sorta like how eBay doesn't give a ripshit about scammers, but woe betide you if you have the temerity to try and resell an authentic Burberry scarf or somesuch.
Where do I apply ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
They don't want people who will end up filing for workers' comp for "tennis elbow".
Reminds me of a joke...
A man walks into a pharmacy to buy some ointment for his tennis elbow. When he asks the pharmacist what brand he recommends, he shows the man his new computer that will analyze a urine sample and give him a diagnosis. The man provides a urine sample and the machine reads "Diagnosis: tennis elbow. Treatment: Tiger Balm". The man tells the pharmacist that he wants to put the machine to the test and takes home a sample cup.
He takes a sample from his wife, his daughter, his dog, and (for good measure) masturbates into the cup.
He returns to the pharmacy and has the pharmacist run the sample through the machine. The machine runs for a while and spits out its diagnosis:
"Your wife is pregnant and the baby is not yours, get a lawyer. Your daughter is back on cocaine, get her back to rehab. Your dog has worms, get him to a vet. By the way, if you don't stop whacking off, your tennis elbow will never get better".
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
It's absolutely true.
I did some work for an adult host years ago, a software gig. It had a tendency to fail under heavy load (cue +5 funny posts in 3.. 2...) but not with synthetic stress tests, so I spent a lot of time watching and waiting for it to fail so I could debug. Absolutely desensitizing, not just for porn but sex in general, and it persisted for a month or two after I left.
Amusing side note: I'd never worked in the industry before and haven't since, so I can't speak to whether you can generalize these numbers to all hosts... I went in there thinking there'd be a bandwidth spike around 8 or 9PM local time. Primarily an American audience, so there was a 5 or 6 hour long peak period as a 2 hour window rolled across North America. What I didn't expect was that there's a similar peak period as ~9:30AM rolls across North America... our theory was that it was people with lower bandwidth connections at home having much better access at work. Or maybe they were just bored.
In any case, if you need something from a co-worker early in the morning, ... knock first.
Look at the photo on this article, why would these folks ever want their faces attached to this job? Think of the following exchange that might happen at a party they attend. Man at Party: "What do you do for a living?" Tool that works for Facebook: "I enforce petty decency laws on people's personal Facebook pages" Man at Party "Thank God there are folks like you combating the posting of areolas and bringing this country back to Christ." Seriously, what do they think they're accomplishing? We're not living in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century.
You are one of these internet nutjobs that wants to repeal both the law against public indecency and go against our social norms, just because this one doesn't suit you.
You found me! and conversely, I have found one of those conservative nutjobs that I would like to outlaw the existence of!