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Microsoft Anti-Porn Workers Sue Over PTSD (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader shares with us a report from The Daily Beast: When former Microsoft employees complained of the horrific pornography and murder films they had to watch for their jobs, the software giant told them to just take more smoke breaks, a new lawsuit alleges. Members of Microsoft's Online Safety Team had "God-like" status, former employees Henry Soto and Greg Blauert allege in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 30. They "could literally view any customer's communications at any time." Specifically, they were asked to screen Microsoft users' communications for child pornography and evidence of other crimes. But Big Brother didn't offer a good health care plan, the Microsoft employees allege. After years of being made to watch the "most twisted" videos on the internet, employees said they suffered severe psychological distress, while the company allegedly refused to provide a specially trained therapist or to pay for therapy. The two former employees and their families are suing for damages from what they describe as permanent psychological injuries, for which they were denied worker's compensation. "Microsoft applies industry-leading, cutting-edge technology to help detect and classify illegal images of child abuse and exploitation that are shared by users on Microsoft Services," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. "Once verified by a specially trained employee, the company removes the image, reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and bans the users who shared the images from our services. We have put in place robust wellness programs to ensure the employees who handle this material have the resources and support they need." But the former employees allege neglect at Microsoft's hands.
I vividly remember when "rotten.com", "bme.com", "ogrish" and "The Sickest sites on the Internet" index were a new and highly appreciated kind of never known before entertainment. Sure, looking into the abyss of psychopathia every day might get boring after a while, but it still sounds better than 90% of other jobs on this planet. I guess they just hired the wrong kind of people to do that job. They should have advertised those jobs on above mentioned pages, 4chan, or the likes of it.
But they knew this was the job, right? Why would you take a job and then keep working a job that you can't stomach?
I'd be great for this job, I'm dead on the inside.
Why do you assume that everyone who's fine with watching sick videos is unqualified to correctly classify them? There's a very broad range between "being grossed out" to "consenting" to what one watches. Otherwise, everyone who has watched a crime movie would have to be banned from this (and many other) jobs.
> I'm mildly curious as to the nature of the law that allows the company to effectively act as law enforcement
By that you mean "look at what's on their servers"?
You can of course look at see what is on your computer. Similarly, Microsoft can look at what is on their computers.
This was well established in cases in which companies were monitoring their network and their computers, which employees were using for personal use as well as for work. Companies, including ISPs and mail providers, can for example have filters to block users from sending out spam. In this case, Microsoft has decided they don't want child porn and certain other material on their systems, and has taken steps to remove it.
Unfortunately, either policy - allowing companies to access their own systems, or not allowing them to access their systems, has problems. If users cared, standard mail clients and other GUI clients would have made GPG/PGP easier, everyone who cared would have been using encrypted email for the last 20 years and it wouldn't be an issue. For whatever reason, people don't care enough to use a GPG/PGP enabled mail client.
Agreed. How your mind works depends on what you feed it. If you feed it poison don't expect it to be healthy. Know when to say no. There are guilty pleasures like cat videos and failblog. When you diverge into child porn and snuff videos you're not going to have the type of mind that will relate to others. That's like a path to the real dark side. The path of a serial rapist or killer, don't go down that road, there is no happy ending there only tragedy. There are a million other better ways of spending the limited time you have on this planet. I think this is why a lot of people are cutting the TV cord and refusing to feed their brains reality TV and other worthless entertainment. Reality shows aren't that much better for the brain than 2 Girls 1 Cup.
dude if you're worried about pictures you send getting flagged as child porn or snuff films, maybe it's you with the problem
You are assuming the pictures came from the sender. If these Microsoft employees get bonuses for finding kiddie porn, like Best Buy empolyees do, then that is a big incentive to plant evidence.
If you think that only the guilty need to fear a moral panic, you should read up on the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic that gripped American in the 1980s. Thousands of innocent people had their lives destroyed by false accusations. Many of these accusations were financially motivated by psychologists charging high fees to retrieve "repressed memories" of "victims", and politicians trying to advance their careers by "saving" children.
This just shows you how weak minded we've gotten. Everyone dies. That is something you need to learn how to accept rather than using medication to suppress it.
The way laws are written. Yes. However, like law enforcement, there is a certain required intent for charges to be filed. Someone who downloads child porn is not the same as someone who is producing it. Much like decriminalizing marijuana or alcohol. The people who have to sit on a bus and smell the skunk-smelling pot smokers aren't going to be charged with consuming cannabis, but the people who actively seek the drug dealers can be, because the crime is about trafficking for sale. That's what CP is. There are producers, dealers and users. For all intents, the way laws are written, are designed only to catch the dumbest people, much like copyright infringement.
It is in fact much easier to charge someone who has child porn with copyright infringement (making unlawful copies of photo or video content of someone without their consent) or voyeurism (eg spying) and the bar is much lower to do that, since you need only evidence that the images were created without the consent of the participant.
Not all "child porn" is actually so. For example, children/preteens/teens may "sext" each other, accidentally (or purposely) their friends, families, to embarrass them or to get them in legal trouble. If the recipient doesn't immediately delete it, or they send it to others, it goes from "viewing child porn" to "distributing child porn" , the latter is considered as bad as murder in some countries courts. If two children sext each other and they are both under 16, there is nothing to charge them with. However if one of their phones is in the possession of their parents, the parent can be. This is why most child porn laws are going to eventually be deleted, along with badly written anti-bullying/trolling laws and will instead be put under copyright law (for the unlawful copying of content without consent of the participant) and the actual "creation" of child porn will go under rape/sexual assault laws to prosecute the actual adults involved with it.
Which goes back to the PTSD thing. Cloudflare is the largest host of child porn, it is unfortunately easy to find because the links are often posted to 8ch , 4chan, reddit, and so forth, but that is just the "common" content that ranges from VHS tapes to stolen webcam/nanny-cam videos that used to proliferate on the alt.binaries.* newsgroups. The less common stuff are things produced in Asia and Europe where age of consent laws are lower or non-existent, and attitudes towards unclothed children aren't considered the same as child porn like it is in North America.
When it comes to PTSD of murder scenes and such, those are posted to the usual places like 4chan/b on purpose, because kids on 4chan are assholes, pirates are assholes, and so forth. People post that stuff because they want to induce PTSD in people. That is why cyberbullying tends to originate entirely from 4chan if not 8ch or reddit.