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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.
Is this how far we've fallen? No more are we concerned with violations of an individual's privacy. Now we are more concerned with the rights of the violators.
I was pretty much done at 2 Girls 1 Cup. Actually, I was done after Goatse. It's bad enough when that kind of shit creeps up on you, but to actually go looking for it... yikes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Jurors complain of similar effects from some of the evidence they're provided, and they are only exposed to horrifying images for fairly limited periods of time in most cases. I don't mean to denigrate your experiences, but if you think PTSD is limited to combat, then you don't dick-all about human psychology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
People are just very different. I totally believe that some people genuinely "feel what they assume people on the screen feel when the images were recorded", and people who are like that are just not the right people for the job. Just like I wouldn't be the right person for any job done at great heights, since I don't feel comfortable walking on some shaky structure above an abyss.
What you're talking about doesn't even come close to what those guys are talking about. There's a difference between goatse and tubgirl and watching an infant have sexual acts performed on them. I'd describe it more, but I've tried to block it out my memory, and even now there's some things you just can't unsee. While I'm here, I'd also like to point out that when people equate drawn porn to actual child pornography, I immediately disregard that person's opinion because these people don't know what they are talking about.
Source: I've removed illegal content off 4chan.
PS: I'm not sure if the folks at Microsoft got to appreciate the legal differences between what kinds of depictions of animal torture/murder are and are not legal. It's actually very clearly defined!
English must not be your first language.
Microsoft has employees that can effectively spy on you for no reason at any time if you're using any of their services.
Much like how Google does it. The reason you can't reach a human is because the humans are too busy spying on you and stealing your data.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As per subject - are these workers doing this stuff full time, year in, year out? In the UK, even the Police who do this are limited to two years on a team that has a responsibility to view the kind of content we're talking about here. Is this the case in companies such as Microsoft? (Note - this was told to me by a copper a few years ago, so, pinch of salt, etc!)
I think Hollywood just found its next movie plot
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.
They got dinged on their Employee Review for *not* watching porn at work.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"They "could literally view any customer's communications at any time.""
Wait. What?
It's always been that way. The deal is free email, etc. accounts for you, and in return the service provider spies on you, selling the details of your personal life to whoever it is that thinks they can profit from having or using it.
It's sold mostly to aggregators – who operate like the credit bureaus – but have few, if any, of those pesky regulations to rein them in when people apply their reports as if they were 100% accurate. You have no recourse if you find an error. Hundreds of companies have a "profile" on you. You have no means to discover who they are. . . or why you didn't get that job promotion that you were in line for. HR bought a copy of your profile from abcdwxyz.com, which is rife with errors, but HR people are stupid, and will read it as truth. Perhaps someone with a similar name has a felony, or worse the report incorrectly states it.
Why Microsoft does not make their spying abundantly clear will hopefully come back to bite them in the ass.
> 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.
This. I was a caregiver to my ALS-stricken wife for three years, and after she passed away, I was diagnosed with PTSD. It's not just combat that's stressful.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Funny.... I'd have PTSD from being forced to engage in warrantless surveillance. Splitting hairs because it's "Microsoft's server, since they aren't the feds they can do anything they want" doesn't make it a good thing to do. They are effectively acting as law enforcement and assisting the feds in sidestepping the 4th amendment. The few people they catch doesn't warrant the intrusion on many people who didn't deserve it. Much like the patriot act and butthole searches at airports. Especially if they report "other crimes" which may be victimless.
THAT would give me PTSD. If I wanted to be law enforcement and "catch bad guys" I would have gotten a criminal justice degree and worked in law enforcement where there's proper checks and balances.
You'd be surprised. Maybe this suit is unique (I've no idea) but the phenomenon certainly isn't: this is a common complaint of people dealing with this kind of material; like police detectives. I've heard that the people dealing with kiddy porn on a daily basis generally don't last very long on that detail; apparently it is not something that you get desensitised to very easily. And a lot of them complained of symptoms that are at least very similar to PTSD. Maybe war isn't the only way to get messed up emotionally, tough guy.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This. I was a caregiver to my ALS-stricken wife for three years, and after she passed away, I was diagnosed with PTSD. It's not just combat that's stressful.
possibly CPTSD? Similar situation here.
Here's an interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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?
Because it would be very bad for evolution if the brain became dysfunctional whenever you experienced something traumatic. It has a range of self-defense mechanisms from immediate responses like adrenaline and emotional shutdown to permanently repressed memories and even split personalities and everything in between. We're able to force ourselves to do things way past the point we get emotionally scarred by it, we bottle it up sometime swithout really realizing it until it bursts.
It's even in the little things, some years back I was on a diet and it was a lot of broccoli as stomach filler to keep me from munching on everything else. I was tired of broccoli, but I was also tired of being fat. So I kept eating broccoli until it hit some kind of tilt, after that I just couldn't stand the taste of it for a few years. Even the smell of it was just revolting to me. I'm guessing it was the job they had, money they needed and thought they just had to grow a thicker hide. So they pushed themselves to do it but instead of becoming immune they hit some kind of tilt, except theirs is a bit worse than mine.
Lots of people experience that looking back in retrospect, how could put up with that kind of abuse or neglect or living like that, well mostly because biology encourages us to look past the negatives. Doesn't matter if you're a sex slave trapped in Fritzl's basement for years, you don't end it. You endure. Maybe it's a long, miserable and apparently hopeless fight but people who go through hell might come out on the other side, reproduce and carry on the genes. Those who figure this shit isn't worth living for don't. It's a morbid rationality to it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's a difference between sensory unpleasantness - and the depths of human depravity. In normal human beings, it's almost impossible to unsee the latter and it gets inside your head in ways chest thumper he men like yourself can't seem to imagine or grasp. And this isn't the first time this has been reported among image moderators, or (and the individual above comments) among jurors for trials concerning this material.
I know several people with PTSD (not just combat vets but other vets from high stress positions, as well as cops and and emergency room medical professionals). One thing they all have in common is they don't brag about it. Nor do they use it as an excuse to put other people down. (And that's setting aside the idiocy of the false equivalency you set up.)
These aren't all public communications that these people were monitoring. No one has to read my email except the people I send it too. (Not even them sometimes.) No one has to do this.
Great, M$ can fire them for viewing child porn instead of paying for their psych treatment . This is a corporate win-win.
Outsource it to India.
What was the source of the data that were these workers filtering? Hotmail emails? Office 365 files? Azure storage blobs? I am more interested in this story from the surveillance angle.
No, he's worried that his private sex video from his girlfriend is viewed by some snotty perv in Microsoft. And apparently he's right. Or he's worried that some business meeting on Skype is viewed by Microsoft employees, which has a name: industrial espionage.
Or he's worried that some Trumpesk figure will have his little list of people he wants to get back at, and Microsoft will do that for him. Or perhaps some politicians is being spied on to influence elections, or some scientist or some judge or or or...
Well, that's kind of a strawman argument; the employees aren't saying that nobody should have to do it; they're saying that if management's plans require someone to do it then management should also have a plan for dealing with the mental health consequences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If I break my leg doing something stupid while drunk, or if I break it while saving an infant from a burning building, the leg is still broken. They put a cast on it either way. If they've sustained psychological damage from policing porn for a paycheck, it doesn't matter if yours is more noble. Not sure why you're turning it into a competition. Is your ego really that small that you need to brag to people you don't know online?
PTSD has specific diagnostic criteria even including exclusion criteria (e.g. not due to substance abuse). The term isn't overbroad, it's just misused, like "Type A personality", which doesn't mean what people think it means.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Emergency room doctors I know are probably all untreated PTSD.
Play Command HQ online
It was just a lie spread by some leftist fanatics. Interestingly, many of the same fanatics mourned over Castro who actually imprisoned gay people.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
I've never seen any statements by Trump that were negative or derogatory towards LGBT.
I thought that for awhile too, but the selection of Mike Pence to run all domestic policy is about as big a 'fuck you' as you can get to LGBT.
just take care of the people that gotta deal with this, i suppose?
It's easier to pretend that it doesn't cause problems. We've had the same problem here, police staff who had to examine pr0n and, in another branch, smoke weed during undercover work, were told they had no basis for a claim because neither pr0n nor weed are harmful to anyone. Which was kinda interesting because the basis for prosecuting people for owning weed was that it was harmful and they needed to be protected from it. Unless they were undercover cops, in which case it wasn't harmful.
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.
Ahh, the 2 girls vid. Reasonably hardcore, but certainly not the worst.
In St. Louis there is actually a house cleaning company called, wait for it:
Two Ladies and a Bucket
I laugh every time I see one of their cars about.
BlameBillCosby.com
He chose Mike Pence as running mate. A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses. He was not okay with just denying them: he jailed them.
And Trump put him a heartbeat from the presidency.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And such a company should lead those employees through a thorough psychological assessment before exposing them to all kinds of psychologically disturbing pictures.
And the fact that their bosses, when they mentioned their stress, told them to go out to smoke a cigarette or to play a video game to relax, shows a total disregard for the psychological stress those people were subjected to. I think they might easily win this case, depending however on the question whether they were directed to do this kind of work, or volunteered to do it--which would make it a bit weird...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
This would be an incorrect statement and you're basing it on a bill Pence signed into law. http://www.in.gov/legislative/...
This bill reclassified various criminal offenses, including "providing false information to a clerk of the circuit court" from a Class D to Level 6 felony. It didn't create any new crimes or make the crime in question any harsher.
The "crime" of applying for marriage licenses came about from the fact that the online method of applying for marriage licenses did not permit you to select male-male or female-female as a combination as the website was created in accordance with the Indiana law that made marriage between people of the same gender illegal. Thus you had to select one spouse as male and one as female. No one has ever been jailed or even prosecuted for doing such a thing so that claim falls short as well. This crime is not specific to homosexual couples as it is with regard to giving the court false information. A couple that submitted the male spouse as female and the female spouse as male would also be equally guilty of the crime. Perhaps the more damning point against your claim that "A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses" is that homosexual couples could still apply for marriage licenses without breaking the law in question by using the paper form and crossing out the male or female section and writing in the appropriate gender.
But hey, whatever, thanks for perpetuating a falsehood to push your own narrative and belief.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Oh for chrissakes, PTSD has been around forever. Ever heard of "shell shock"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.