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."'"

Comments

Pussies

[alexborges]

I mean, i've seen my share of ugly shit in the net. I do think that i've seen most of the worse it has to offer. I mean REALLY? Are there people out there that will get all fucked up because of goatse?

Has this people ever seen Benneton's magazzine War issue? Have they seen the news?

The world is ugly. Believeing otherwise, makes you neurotic.

Re:Here's the thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup.

Rotten.com reminds me of contemporary/postmodern art. People who work in that idiom spend all their time exhibiting crap, asking 'is this art'? It's high time we as a society said 'no, it's not, shut up and stop calling yourself and artist'.

Rotten.com puts horrible, awful images for the public to view, and asks 'shouldn't free speech include _this_?'. We should answer: no. There's no sane reason why anyone would want to see those images unless they work as medical examiners or in funeral parlors. Allowing rotten.com normalizes disturbed behavior and gives psychos comfort. Close it down.

Re:I have read far worse than I have seen

[Locke2005]

Worse while not law breaking the amount of hate espoused and condoned on some sites boggles the mind.

Yeah, the microsoft-bashers on slashdot ARE pretty bad!

My response, stop complaining.

[elucido]

These guys sit in an office doing a simple job and are complaining in an economy where millions of people would take their job. Is this the best article Slashdot could find? Whining office employees who don't like their jobs screening internet content? Perhaps they'd rather join the unemployed instead?

Re:My response, stop complaining.

[elucido]

Nice try. You disagree with someone so you accuse them of something heinous. The world is not black and white, it's grey. The point is anyone who has a job right now should be lucky enough to have a job at all, especially if its a well paid office job where they sift through images all day.

So you are saying there are risks associated with their job? You have people working in mines risking their lives breathing in toxins. You have people who work in nuclear power plants. You have people who work as police officers who actually want to capture these sickos who create these images. You have people who work in hospitals and morgues who actually physically handle dying and dead bodies associated with these images.

I'm sorry but I don't think just looking at images is a tough job. Sure it's more difficult than what you probably do, but if you knew what millions of other people were doing you wouldn't think about this article differently. You have people who risk their lives to make the world safe, and you have people who screen images and who get PTSD doing that.

I'm not denying that their PTSD is real. I'm not denying that their reaction is real. I'm saying they aren't fit for that kind of work and if we can figure out why, and steer them away from that kind of work, it would spare individuals like them from having to deal with the side effects in the future.

Complaining about the work is not a step in the right direction. A step in the right direction would be to conduct a study to find out why some people react more severely to images than others and find a way to diagnose them with a test early on in the hiring process.

BTW I think you owe me an apology for accusing me of being one of the bad guys. That was inappropriate.

Re:I notice with interest

[elucido]

If you can't handle the job, why did you take it?

If you aren't tough enough, don't take the job.

[elucido]

I don't understand why you all took these jobs if you couldn't handle it.
It's just images, no matter how sick it is or how disgusting, if you are a mature adult you should be able to handle any image of anything.

They should screen people to see who can actually do the job rather than hiring people who get depressed easily.

Re:solution:

[elucido]

I used to think I was one of those people, until I saw a full length, uncut video of some terrorists beheading a captured American.

I would advise anybody who thinks they're not one of those "overly sensitive" people to give it some serious thought before they decide to watch something like that, much less get a job doing it all day long. Some things you just cannot un-see - although you'll certainly wish you could.

I think I saw the video you are talking about, the video of the Russian Neo Nazi's who beheaded those two jewish guys. I thought the video was brutal, cruel, but it has no serious affect because I knew people were brutal and cruel before I saw the video.

People who are so sensitive that they cannot watch a person get beheaded, have psychological issues of their own to deal with because they have been sheltered from the real world. The real world is cold, brutal and cruel, and if someone knows the world is like this then they can actually learn to value the people in their lives who aren't cold, brutal and cruel.

It can help a person to see the true nature of mankind or it can hurt a person, depending on how they interpret what they see. Videos like that allow people to see that yes there really are people in this world who are dangerous, who want to kill them, who hate them, and nobody, not aliens, not Jesus, is going to protect them from these people. The only ones who can protect them from these sick people are good people who dedicate their lives to protecting them.

It's about perspective.

Re:solution:

[Gooberheadly]

Hahahaha... slashdot trolling, 9/10, almost farkworthy, comparing those that *aren't* okay with letting child porn and child abuse slide by with the Soviets.