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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.
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.
Without reading your comment, I got the impression from your subject that you were selling something. Now that, I thought, is truly depraved.
I'd like to see Mike spend a day cleaning up the interwebs!
And how frequently do you click on random URLs from people you don't know now that you've had that experience?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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?
there needs to be a +5 horrifying
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
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
You're hired
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.
Yes. Soldiers return home suffering from many psychological disorders, including PTSD, due to the horrible things they see and experience while deployed.