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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."'"
hire via 4chan?
So it's like getting paid to browse /b/?
I thought that was the definition of "browsing the Internet".
I've done this as an Information Security person. Get a report, validate, pass it on to the cops and FBI.
Not fun at all.
Glad it's 10 years behind me.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
...is other people.
Hope all you bastards are happy. First time I saw that image, I had nightmares for a month.
4chan'll do that to you...
As the great Jello Biafra once said: "Want to see child porn? Join the vice squad."
Oh, come on. Rotten isn't actually bad.
Rotten displays very candid pictures that you won't see in the mainstream media; things like terrible gunshot wounds, accidents, strange medical cases and so on. They're candid, and they're shocking, but they're not disturbing, at least once you've seen a couple and have gotten used to seeing things you don't usually see in our society.
Disturbing is something else. Have you ever seen a video of a puppy getting tortured and killed slowly, for instance? Even if you can't actually see much, it's horrifying. In fact, it's horrifying precisely WHEN you can't see anything, because between the frenzied howls of pain and anguish, your mind fills in the blanks of what must be happening, and you're powerless - absolutely powerless! - to stop the whole thing. You don't know who's doing it, you don't know where they are, you don't know anything. The only thing you know is that the moment you're watching it, the puppy already HAS died a horrible, painful, slow death, and even if they catch the guy who did it, the events in the video can't be undone or prevented anymore.
THAT is disturbing.
It's something that happens for police officers, too, BTW; those who're working on serial killer/rape/... cases will often need psychologica help after reviewing photographs and videos and so on.
And these are trained professionals who're only doing it *sometimes*, as part of their job, and they're officers who've already seen a lot, who're older and have already got more life experience and so on.
Can you imagine being a 20-year old who's doing NOTHING ELSE but review things like that, eight hours a day, five days a week, for an entire year or more?
It's gonna mess you up something bad. And rotten? Rotten doesn't even begin to compare to it. Rotten is harmless.
I notice with interest the posters of "can it really be that bad?" type of comments.
It can.
I spent some years handling abuse@ for a national-sized ISP that allowed "homepages" via dialin. Let's just say that I had severe temper-issues for a long while after that.
I'd like to see Mike spend a day cleaning up the interwebs!
Occasionally seeing disturbing images is not a problem for most people, but if you spend 40 hours a week, every week, looking at all sorts of disturbing crap, your mind will become twisted.
Being forced to look at kiddie porn as part of your job could really mess you up. Looking at pictures of gory violence, torture, and abuse of all kinds, all day, day after day... I'd say that would mess somebody up far more than occasional crap coming up during web browsing.
Say what you will about rotten.com needing to go away, I think it needs to stick around, I think depicting the finality of death and how grotesque it really is may cause some children to make better choices, "maybe playing with dad's gun is a bad idea", "maybe jumping onto moving trains is a bad idea". Everyone in the world dies, Americans just seem to be the only country that likes to shelter their kids from death.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Please. There are images of sick shit out there because sick shit happens in the world. And most of what's on Rotten.com is little more than occasionally shocking ... gory injuries and deaths, oh no. Nothing compared to some of the shit that's out there.
Or get a braille screen and hire blind people.
What if we turn this around and consider that maybe those who apply for jobs to screen the internet already have an unhealthy fascination with weird and/or illegal content? Maybe the post-contract counseling only reveals all the issues they harbored prior to starting the work?
I'm not saying this is the case, but it's a possibility...
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I used to be a content moderator for ehow.com, a demand media subsidiary. Luckily all I had to do was sort out the bad user articles that weren't up to their quality standard. I came across some oddly disturbing stuff but at least it was only text. I definitely now have it embedded in my mind though that 99% of people can't write an article properly to save their own life and most Americans are degenerate mutant freaks who need to go back to school to learn basic grammar and spelling skills but other than that, I came out of it perfectly sane lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
i was preparing to apologize for a lack of clarity in the summary, but, on further review, sorry, it really is just you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Occasionally seeing disturbing images is not a problem for most people, but if you spend 40 hours a week, every week, looking at all sorts of disturbing crap, your mind will become twisted.
I think just about anyone could handle seeing someone after a "BOOM HEADSHOT" or one of those other things we take lightly in so-called "violent video games". It's easy to say "It's not me, it's not someone I know" or anything else we tell ourselves.
After seeing it over and over, though, you start to wonder what if it were you or someone you knew. You start immersing yourself in possibilities like we're programmed to, rehearsing the situation in case you ever had to face it. You start living life making sure it doesn't happen to you, watching out for attackers, people out to hurt your family, people out to rape your children. You start to worry about yourself, wondering if another human being did it so can you... because you can't tell yourself to be cruel is inhuman anymore.
When you're immersed in the worst the killer instinct kicks in. Not the Counter Strike bullshit, not that stuff you see in the movies where there's a cause or justification, everything loses intrinsic value, every life but your own loses meaning. It's all about you and surviving.
After that it takes years to fit back in, but it'll never be a perfect fit.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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)
The problem for many people is the incongruity between how they were raised and reality. People are generally raised to believe that people are good, that there are norms of behavior, there is justice in the world, authority figures can be trusted, things happen for reason and are overseen by an omnipotent deity. As we grow up, we learn that these are simply convenient lies that define our society.
When presented with conflicting visual evidence, we can be shocked and damaged - our world view is broken. Some go into denial (classifying the content as depravity), and some go into depression (recognizing that society is simply a veneer). Education and experience over time tends to break these falsehoods more gently, incrementally. The Internet is not so gentle.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
There's a little phrase at the core of the American society. "Freedom of speech". You might be familiar with it.
When any person or group has the ability to make decisions on what the whole of society can say or read, it brings an end to our liberties. Just because you don't believe Rotten.com should be up doesn't mean that there aren't others who appreciate it. I don't like seeing mythology based rantings which are frequently misrepresented as factual historical accounts or a basis for modern life (i.e., religion for those who didn't catch that). The difference is, if anyone made a move to censor their speech, I would defend their right to say it, even if I disagree with every word they say.
If a person, group, or even mob rule were to guide censorship, virtually everything would be censored.
The stuff on rotten.com really isn't bad. It seems bad, because you have likely been protected from it your whole life. It's not necessary to see such things, but there are people world wide who see first hand the reality of what is portrayed in those images. For every picture they post, there was at least one witness, the photographer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
These are probably the same guys who, in high school, thought it would kick ass to be a Gynecologist. It never seemed to enter their heads that if a woman is paying them to check out her vagina, chances are... it's because of something a typical man would never want to see...
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?
I think it's safe to say that if you think Goatse is even close to the bad things on the internet*, or that you think that the worst stuff you've seen wouldn't mess someone up, than you have not at all seen the worst the internet has to offer.
The world is MUCH uglier than what any publication shows. ANY.
*On a scale of -10 to 10 (0 being neutral, 10 being awesome and -10 being disturbing) Goatse Ranks a -2. You don't even breach -5 until you see the involuntary stuff. Where people are tied up and forced into terrible acts of sexual abuse and mutilation. Then you see the same thing happen to children. A man's anus pales in comparison.
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.
However, jumping in front of them with 5 of your best friends gives you a shot at becoming a rolling badass.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
"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?
I feel the need to reinforce the tsunami of rage against censoring bastards like you. Despite whatever revulsion you feel about the site, it's your own will to go there or not go there. Keeping others from looking at it is impossible and evil. That is simple a battle that you cannot win, because there are too many good smart people willing to fight you.
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 needs to be a +5 horrifying
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
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.
I was about to post how I can't imaging anything so gross or horrible I haven't already seen on the Internet and how it wouldn't bother me.
Thanks for fixing that.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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
Often times you can just tell. Once you see enough BSDM, you can tell when people are role playing. Especially when its in some room painted all black, and the people come out unmasked, and all those little nuances. When its comes from some tripod across the room in some empty warehouse, the guys wear ski masks to protect their identity and are viciously brutal beyond the point of "just enough to hurt but not leave marks". No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye.
Either way - faked or not - it doesn't really matter. If its convincing enough to seem like real abuse, it's disturbing.
You'll notice more and more BSDM sites are putting the disclaimer at the beginning or end of their videos with both parties saying on camera they consent to the activities.
I mean, not that I would know anything about that.
Pics or it didn't happe — OH JESUS MY EYES!
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
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
Usually a thorough backround check can determine if the individual is a sociopath or not. Just being able to see disgusting images and not react doesn't make one a sociopath. It depends on whether or not it was their first time seeing it, and it depends on how they look at it.
You can look at images of dead bodies, you've seen them before so you have no reaction. This doesn't make someone a psychopath or sociopath, as a sociopath would react like that in all situations no matter whos dead body it is, while most people who are just jaded or mature will only react when it happens to someone they care about, and even then, you cannot really judge reaction by whether or not they cry or get sick, you have to look at brainwaves and actually see if their brain can connect or is wired in a way so that it registers specific emotions involved with seeing brutality.
Most people can train themselves to shut that part of their brain off as part of their job. So they can function as a sociopath would function as part of their job, but they don't function like that in private. A sociopath or psychopath functions like that in all situations, all the time, in private, whether they have a job or not.
This is very much like the difference between a doctor or morgue technician, who deals with the human body in a clinical fashion, and the sociopath who might consider it play and not do it for money.
Obviously you don't have children yourself. As a parent, one of my worst fears is: "that could happen to my child."
So you're childless when you get the job, then a bit down the road you have one and then it starts hitting you. Or the nature of the job changes and you're now exposed to something that you weren't before (A site being used to evade child porn investigations would absolutly qualify if it wasn't when you started)
Sometimes you don't know what you're going to be exposed to until you already are, you think you can handle anything until you don't. It's why people say, "you wish you could unsee something".
Or you think you're cool with it, but then it comes back a a horrifying flash at random moments or in a dream, the mind is weird that way.
If it's bad enough and fast enough, they call it Post Traumatic Stress.
Everyone has Aspergers now. It's the new Twinky defense.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
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>
That's not true. There are people who are into role-playing who are also into masochism. Some of them even like being marked (bruises, scarring), it's a turn-on for them.
Sure, most masochists are ashamed and don't want to be marked (or they know that being marked will affect their "normal" life). But not all...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's what they have a tendency to post, eg threats against specific persons, calls to violence, etc, that can cross the legality line.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Something that only appears involuntary is going to be just as shocking to a viewer as something that is truly involuntary. Since we're talking about the strength of the impression on the viewer, it only matters what they think they're seeing. (I'm *not* saying that they should be treated the same in the eyes of the law)
While I'm sure you can often tell when a video is fake, I'm not convinced it's so easy to tell for a fact that a video is not. Without the ability to somehow confirm that a video is real, telling the fakes apart from the real videos is an exercise in futility. That certain videos look real compared to others that look fake to you is no way to confirm the accuracy of your identifications. Some extreme videos may indeed show enough as to leave very little doubt as to their reality, but are all the videos that seem real to you quite so extreme as that?
I do agree, however, that a video that's convincing enough to look real will be disturbing to those who are convinced that it's real. I guess I'm just skeptical about the number of such videos in existence... or it could be I just have my head buried in the sand.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I'd disagree. Violence is much more acceptable in the US than nudity and there is something wrong with a child that needs to see a head being sawed off to realise people die and violence is bad.
only shows that you are out of touch with reality, and that you have some serious problems
"People are generally raised to believe that people are good, that there are norms of behavior, there is justice in the world, authority figures can be trusted, things happen for reason and are overseen by an omnipotent deity. As we grow up, we learn that these are simply convenient lies that define our society."
reality is that most people really are good, there really are norms of behavior, and there is a genuine concerted effort to promote justice in the world (the trustworthy authority and the god part: yeah, you're right, those are lies)
point is, there are some really screwed up people in this world: for example, that chinese chick who put a kitten under her high heels and maciated it to death on camera. it is the genuine truth that most people would never do this. i'm not asking for your comment about how under force, most people would do this: of course, under force, anyone would do this, but this woman chose do it of her own volition. she's screwed up, she's outside the norm, she's rare and demented
so the really fucked up things you see on the internet is not some sort of baseline of the genuine reality as you suggest, and is not the truth of human behavior. it is the work of some really, really fucked up depraved people
most people are good and decent, really
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye ... If its convincing enough to seem like real abuse, it's disturbing.
Oh, bullshit. I've had way worse than a black eye from perfectly consensual BDSM activities. I've been pierced dozens of times at once, taken beatings that left bruises still visible months later, had an electro-shock baton that could throw a spark centimeters long (allegedly of a type favored by Apartheid-era South African riot police) used on me, and enjoyed it all. I wasn't being filmed at the time, but it seems very likely that if I had been, it would look like 'real abuse' to you. To me, it was just fun. Real, intense masochists *do* exist, and 'disturbing' is always in the eye of the beholder.
I think he was talking about Daniel Pearl, a journalist kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002.
And sorry, but the "real world" does not involve frequent beheadings. Being unable to see another human being brutally murdered without being disturbed isn't a result of living "sheltered".
That's the vast majority of the world. Going by the numbers, lack of brutal decapitations is the norm. You talk down to people who can't stand such a sight, and think you somehow value life more?
Yours was the most bizzare high-horse post I've ever read.
It does not change the fact that the real world is cold, brutal, vicious and cruel. Whether you see beheadings, shootings, stabbings, it's happening everywhere and only the methods of brutality are different. People are being brutally murdered all around the world in all environments, in all methods and by all means. Once you understand this then you will understand that it's the nature of man to kill with a weapon.
Once you understand that mankind if a violent species, then you don't have to emotionally react to it because it's not a shocking revelation. The correct response is to treat it as a problem to be solved and how do we protect people from becoming victims? At the same time we have to protect psychologically sensitive individuals from being exposed to the brutal reality, and the problem we face is that the individuals who want to do something about it cannot communicate in the same language with individuals who don't believe the world is as dangerous, cold, or cruel as it is.
So how do we accept the true nature of mankind and deal with it in a way that does not harm the most sensitive among us?
It's not a matter of talking down to people. Not everybody should choose to be in a job which deals with the brutal aspects of human nature. These individuals can work with children, or take jobs which don't deal with violent crime, death, and the like.
But it does not change the fact that in order for these people to live under the illusion of safety, good people have to face the brutality of the world directly and deal with it. Safety is not free, you need people who are willing to hunt down people who hurt innocent people. Part of hunting them down requires analysis of images, analysis of psychology, and many other roles which exist for individuals who can fill them. So it's not about one role being better than another, it's about accepting a role you are fit for and if you cannot psychologically handle a job you shouldn't naively go into it.
Yes, I suppose thats true. I cannot say for certain that the videos are indeed %100 in their authenticity.
I guess where you are skeptical about how many are real, I'm just more worried that they are.
Yes. Soldiers return home suffering from many psychological disorders, including PTSD, due to the horrible things they see and experience while deployed.
Of course because porn isn't harmful and any study that says it is must be wrong.
I am sure that their are a lot of "disturbing images" but many studies have also shown that porn also has negative effects.
The thing is that most people on Slashdot do not want to believe it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.