The In-House Decency Patrol At Facebook 157
theodp writes "How'd you like a job where you get fired if you DON'T view porn at work? Newsweek reports on Facebook's internal police force of 150 staffers who are charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. Part hall monitors, part vice cops, the $50,000-a-year 'porn cops' also keep Facebook safe for corporate advertisers."
Re:Rampant Sexism (Score:3, Informative)
Welp, this is a larger societal issue, not just an issue with facebook.
There are protests around the world where women basically go topless and get arrested for it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I for one welcome our firm, C-cup overlords.
Re:Rampant Sexism (Score:3, Informative)
If you are exposed to breasts frequently enough, they wouldn't be as titillating.
Like the women that work at Onsens and Sento in Japan: when I went to a Sento [wikipedia.org] (bath house), I didn't see a single male attendant. The women attendants would walk around cleaning stuff, and the nude men(myself included) would just ignore them.
*yawn* (Score:3, Informative)
When I worked at Xoom.com (of the "free homepages" fame ala geocities) over 10 years ago, we had several people on staff with the same job. But instead of 'porn cops' we jokingly referred to them as 'porn whackers'. The biggest reason for having people paid to go through this stuff was to remove kiddie porn and report it to the FBI.
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:4, Informative)
Heh, let's put it this way, at BellTV there are cubicles on the fifth floor of one of the buildings with explicit 'stop' signs on them with some explanation that if you walk into one of those cubicles you may see something that may offend you, well, if you do walk in you may see maybe 10 monitors with at least some of them showing porn and there are people sitting there looking at it and it is part of the job. They are basically QAs that really have to watch this stuff all the time. And they get paid to do this.
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:2, Informative)
That is the problem though. There is a stigma built around working in the adult industry that makes any skills you picked up working in it hard to transfer. How do you put "created a streaming webcam with credit-based billing" on your resume? I mean, how do you move forward post-porn without lying on your resume?
Plus, even while you work in the industry, life is hard. Most hosts won't take you, and if they do, you are liable to be dumped at a moments notice. Banks dont like you. CC companies would love do dump you but you make too much for them (try 15% transaction fees for a month and get back to me). But lets forget about that... lets say you want to outsource something like your trouble ticketing or email. You can do it, but you have to really read the TOS first, and even then they can (and will) drop you at a moments notice. Thus you can rule out most everything interesting (for example, Amazon EC2 would be a perfect fit for video transcoding).
Oh, did I mention that your password is almost definitely *not* stored as a hash? Yup. Storing your member password as plaintext is pretty much industry standard. If you pull up a customer in your billers website or something like NATS, right under their login will be their password. Why? Because there is no solid integration between any components. Your biller has a loose coupling with your member manager, which has a loose coupling with your authentication system, of which your CMS doesn't know anything about. For example, most sites use HTTP authentication because it is probably the easiest way to secure a members area. Why? Because most adult CMSes has no idea about "members"... you have to basically add a shim between them and your web server to make sure only members get in. The CMS has no way to sign out, no "hello anonymous coward", nothing...
Really, the whole industry is whack. Most of the reason is because porn is taboo. As a result, the industry attracts scammers and flakes.