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The Hell Known As Internet Screening Services
circletimessquare writes "Do you think your job is bad? Some websites outsource their moderation to firms where every work day, all work day, workers do nothing but sift through depravity after depravity. '"You have 20-year-old kids who get hired to do content review, and who get excited because they think they are going to see adult porn," said Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer at MySpace. "They have no idea that some of the despicable and illegal images they will see can haunt them for the rest of their lives."' Some places only do year-long contracts, and have counseling services and staff psychologists, because of the psychological issues caused by this kind of work. One psychologist 'reached some unsettling conclusions in her interviews with content moderators. She said they were likely to become depressed or angry, have trouble forming relationships and suffer from decreased sexual appetites. Small percentages said they had reacted to unpleasant images by vomiting or crying. "The images interfere with their thinking processes. It messes up the way you react to your partner," Ms. Laperal said. "If you work with garbage, you will get dirty."'"
4chan'll do that to you...
Maybe a nice soothing viewing of the human centipede?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede
(warning, even reading the description will make you reach for the brain bleach)
Oh, they'll filter alright. Just the other way around.
Actually, a better solution: Just upload EVERYTHING to /b/. If it gets reposted by anonymous, automatically add it to a filter list. That way you don't have to pay people to do the work. This reverse-filter idea is a good one!
Sounds like a candidate for Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs TV show, except they can't show the images on TV, but his reactions and commentary would be great.
"She said they were likely to become depressed or angry, have trouble forming relationships and suffer from decreased sexual appetites."
So it has similar effects as playing world of warcraft?
More than 80% of this work can be knocked out with a digital fingerprinting tool like tineye.com uses. Spiders can check every image referenced from any myspace.com html against a fingerprint match with a blacklist of images.
TFA mentions google doing something like this with YouTube videos, but it sounds like the majority of sites are crowdsourcing their visitors to flag content that gets reviewed by these folks. A digital fingerprinting tool can eliminate tedious review by both visitors and the moderators.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There are enough of us around who're looking for a meaningful job. The dark side of the Internet may disgust us, but in general, the older members of society are jaded to some of the depravities of life, and less likely to be bothered. Not that I'd take that job right now... but there was a time a few years back...
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
One of my colleagues' former jobs was to index the photograph archives of an international police organization. He spoke about some unspeakable crime scene photos that he took years to get over. The mere descriptions of the photos also took *us* years to get over.
This kind of thing is not good for anyone.
Kriston
The company's roughly 50 workers view a combined average of 20 million photos a week.
That's 10,000 images per hour per person, assuming a 40-hour week. (For $8-12 per hour). How can they do that? Even if the numbers are exaggerated, just looking at that many images has to be wearing.
thanks a lot for reminding us that there are NO EXCEPTIONS to rule 34.
I'm not even going to bother to verify that one.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
/signed.
People in general need to grow the f* up and be adults.
*Deal* with it!
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Everyone has Aspergers now. It's the new Twinky defense.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Insightful as hell. If I had mod points I'd toss you one.
It does make you wonder what other kinds of jobs are disillusioning -- certainly I'd put government jobs that are actually public-facing in that bin, if in a slightly different way. I recently did some contract work for a city government and the people I worked with there had an unreal collection of stories in which they were shot at, otherwise attacked, or inappropriately urinated on or near by people. As someone who still believed that, if not exactly that people are basically good, that they didn't generally do things like that, I found it a little horrifying -- but you could tell that these people had just become desensitized to the fact that someone who was angry at something wholly unrelated to them might just walk into their office with a gun or piss on their desk.
I've also heard it claimed a number of times that software testers tended to have high divorce rates because their job forces them to be so exacting at finding fault, but I've never tried to hunt down data to confirm or refute that.
One idea, (probably a terrible one but maybe worth mentioning here) is have confessed child molesters do it.
I am not any type of psychologist, nor do I know much about the criminal system, but maybe experiencing that flood of sewage will give them negative associations with those images that they lack naturally. Maybe seeing some CP that would appeal to them among tons of images that would be repugnant to anyone, which sounds like what these screening services have to deal with, would make the whole mess less appealing to them.
On the other hand, I also see the obvious potential dangers of taking non-violent molesters and showing them CP alongside violent images.
From what I've heard, reforming them through prison and counseling doesn't really work. I don't know how convincing the evidence for that is, maybe that's not true, but maybe there's no way to make it worse by viewiing this stuff. I also haven't seen anything to suggest you can deprogram someone's sexuality like that, I've heard that those programs trying to turn gay people straight are complete wastes of time, so it's probably not something that's malleable. TFA talks about decreased sexual appetites with the current workers, that's probably due to the fact that the worst of the worst doesn't appeal to them, wheras that might appeal to the molesters and might be counter-effective.
Who knows? I certainly don't, nor would I be at all interested in these jobs, child molesters, or studying any of the above, but it seems like some criminal psychologist might want to run a small trial of that.
Yes.
That's a categorical answer, but for Rotten.com in particular, trust me, if you ever have to deal with gore in real life, you'll be glad for every ounce of desensitization you got.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm as hardened as any anon - no shock site will faze me anymore - but I would probably be seriously disturbed if I saw someone die in real life, or saw a lot of blood or something. It's the difference between real pain and suffering and pictures on the internet that are probably fake anyway.
Also, cue moar pooper comic
Because he didn't know the depths of depravity he would see before taking it, and after he had it he felt pressured by "macho" assholes not to "whuss out" by proving he's a human with human reactions?
When I was on a federal grand jury once. One of the Assistant US Attorneys had a habit of bringing in a piece of evidence for the grand jury to examine during the cases. Bringing an indictment against a prisoner for making a shiv? Pass around the confiscated shiv in an evidence bag. Bringing an indictment for safety violations? Pass around photos of the unsafe truck. Bringing an indictment on child porn? Well, he didn't pass them around. Instead he placed them face down on the table, described the photos, and then said that if anyone wanted to view them they could.
No one did, probably because you had to walk to the front of the room filled with 20 people. Still, part of me wanted to go up, look at them oh so slowly, salivating, say, "Oh. Oh. That's. That's... That's nasty. Mmmm." Then turning and excusing myself for the bathroom, just to watch their horrified faces.
Never did though.
Mike is the man who has inseminated turkeys with a syringe, and gotten turkey jizz on himself. He has immersed himself in ponds of feces. He's been inside machines that grind up animals. He's hung off skyscrapers, wind turbines, and all manner of high ugly places.
He's a brave guy. It's not that he's braver than any of the people he covers - they all just think of it as their job. But he's sampled ALL that ugliness in employment has to offer.
And, yes, I fully expect that he'd probably projectile-vomit at some point while covering that job.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
In all sincerity, I envy you, sir. I wish I'd had enough foresight to refrain from watching it.