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."
Rampant Sexism (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate how incredibly sexist the filtering is. Both sexes (generally) have a pair of nipples that appear very similar, so for one pair to be fine for prime-time television, and another pair to be fined for a fleeting appearance on TV seems very silly.
It isn't the shape of the female breast that is the issue, as a picture of a model wearing a skimpy swimming suit would pass. Male nipples? Also just fine.
Female Nipples? WHOAH, STOP THE PRESSES!
(Even if the nipple is currently feeding a child [cnn.com])
Their advertizers are scum anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm aware that the advertizing is targeted, but all I ever see are ads for dating sites or russian mail-order brides.
Oh, and those "free" credit report companies, who make the russian mailorder bride people look reputable.
Also, isn't facebook losing money hand over fist anyway? They'd probably do better if they moved to a subscription model that let you look at other user's porn.
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
yep. my first "job"ã(back in high school) was translating pirated movies for a small video shop somewhere in Eastern Europe.
more than half of what i had to do was porn, and i liked it, because it was easier than normal films, and paid the same.
and the hard ons were for free.
good times ...
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a web hosting company that caters to the adult industry. Looking at porn is a job requirement.
However, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Porn doesn't discriminate.
I'll let you figure it out.
I know... And it's a shame (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked in internet advertising and know how important ads are to many useful services AND that they often contain info I actually want to see and click (job openings, products that interest me, etc.).
So while I use adblock, I have very limited block list that I have personally made. It consists of: Ads that blink so much they literally hurt your eyes, ads that very clearly lie ("you are millionth visitor" or adult friend finder ads) and... that's pretty much it. The list has gotten quite long but still only contains those.
For long, I tried to struggle not to add facebook ads to the list. However, all the ads I am getting are VERY deceptive. There are numerous, poorly translated "[celebrity name] IQ is 136, test your's!" (sometimes using a friend's name instead of celebrity's) or "[Friend's name] has done [insert new thing], try it out" when they haven't... And then there are all the ads designed to look just like facebook buttons so that you would accidentally click them...
Though I have worked in the business, I have never seen any other site so consistently filled with that shady ads. Even porn sites mostly have real poker ads. Google has MUCH stricter policies on ads allowed. I can't imagine this kind of ad policy being good for FB in the long run.
Same job somewhat (Score:1, Interesting)
Had this job too at a very large software company when debugging the browser code. It was the darn pron videos that would crash, or some badly formed html at the pron sites.
We had to get the employee handbook changed to exempt us from any issues.
I then helped write the nntp client, which only increased the amount of porn.
Re:Being spied upon (Score:3, Interesting)
Random strangers can't go snooping through your stuff. The whole point of Facebook is to make what used to be an open field day on private information (geocities then myspace, etc.) a more private and protected one.
Facebook themselves brag about the privacy and personal protection measures. Nobody can tell if you rejected them (without effort) or what groups you've left, or if you posted photos privately for a specific friend or family member ...
When users try to get around it, its a ToS violation, but then they themselves violate these rules.
Internal Corruption (Score:4, Interesting)
He got transferred to the Vice Unit which seen like a demotion for a homicide detective. His explanation was that no police officer spent more that eighteen months in the Vice Unit because it tended to corrupt the offices and turn them into the criminals they where fighting.
If this holds true, and I have mo reason to doubt my former neighbor, will this be a temporary assignment? Or will we start seeing these employees start posting there own girl meet donkey videos?
--
The American Form of Government [youtube.com]
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:2, Interesting)
As somebody who is getting out of the porn industry, I can vouche for this. It is like guys who print money all day. Yeah, you work with billions of dollars a day, but to you it is basically paper.
Plus, assholes will eventually leek a password to your paid content and use up 10TB of your bandwidth in a few days, costing you several thousand dollars in overages. That and everybody in the industry are a bunch of damn flakes running out of their kitchen table. Ever tried to deposit a 30,000 dollar Canadian check? Takes about a month to clear. Why dont they wire, you ask? No can do... nobody does wire transfers.
I'd go on, but screw it. The worst part is you can't really use your experiance working on such things on your resume or in your portfolio. Nobody wants to read "used photoshop to remove the background from dudes banging eachother on a bed" or "responsible for maintaining the billing system of several dozen lesbian porn sites".
It is basically a career black hole... if you dont get out quickly, you'll become stagnant and stop learning. Since nobody wants to talk about porn in public, the industry is forced to exist in its own little world with very little interaction with the rest of the computing landscape. It is like an insular little group that doesn't exchange ideas with the outside. They've got their own CMS's, their own billing systems, their own webhosts, their own everything. All of it home-grown and all of it like five years behind the rest of the computing industry...
Basically... it sucks. Sounds good in theory, but in reality. Dont do it. And whoever said that not everybody in porn is hot is right. Sure some of the stuff you work with is okay, but since everybody gets off to something different, most of what you work with is not what you personally would find attractive at all.
Re:so lest get this straight (Score:3, Interesting)
If I operated a porn business, I'd make sure it's only stuff I personally enjoy. Like the guy who runs the DOMAI website - nothing but nude images of women. He refuses to deal with anything else, since he doesn't enjoy anything else. That's the way to enjoy both life and your career.