The Hell Known As Internet Screening Services 557
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."'"
I notice with interest (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:NYTimes subscription ... (Score:1, Informative)
Not paywalled here:
Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.
Ricky Bess works near Orlando, Fla., and says workers are affected by the images they must view day after day.
An Internet content reviewer, Mr. Bess sifts through photographs that people upload to a big social networking site and keeps the illicit material — and there is plenty of it — from being posted. His is an obscure job that is repeated thousands of times over, from office parks in suburban Florida to outsourcing hubs like the Philippines.
i wrote the summary (Score:3, Informative)
i was preparing to apologize for a lack of clarity in the summary, but, on further review, sorry, it really is just you
Re:Goatse Posters (Score:2, Informative)
Re:NYTimes subscription ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dirty Jobs episode? (Score:4, Informative)
Heh. Because watching Mike sitting in front of a monitor all day, with his brand of narration/commentary, on a bunch of stuff that Discovery can't show or even possibly talk about given the subject matter and their audience would be great to watch.
That wouldn't make for very good TV.
I'm sure it's a dirty job (I certainly wouldn't want to do it), but I'd imagine there are quite a few dirty jobs that Discovery just wouldn't be willing to air. Heck, they've aired some stuff (like the episode where he castrates goats) that I couldn't believe they aired.
Re:Here's the thing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I have to do this sometimes... (Score:3, Informative)
It's what they have a tendency to post, eg threats against specific persons, calls to violence, etc, that can cross the legality line.
Re:Just do a backround check. (Score:2, Informative)
Anon because I've modded.
It's not that big of a deal. I watched a 15 year old girl die when she came in with massive swelling of her brain. When the neurosurgeon got into the fluid-filled spaces to relieve the pressure, the fluid hit the wall of the OR. She got better for a few minutes, and then she ran out of space to swell into. A side effect of this was that she went into pulmonary edema, so pink froth was pouring from the tube in her throat faster than we could suck it out.
I watched a man with lung cancer die when his tumor finally ate into the pulmonary artery. He coughed, once, and the wisps of tissue separating that artery (right off the heart) and the inside of his lungs gave way.
He coughed with increasing violence as he proceeded to drown in his own blood, every cough increasing the torrent. I was only 30 yards away when it started. Obviously, there's not much you can do about this, although we tried.
I've watched a man die when the giant aneurysm in his chest exploded only 5 minutes before he would have been on a heart-lung bypass machine. I've pulled the plug on trauma victims that were so swollen with fluid that they looked like the Michelin Man. I've seen a 26 year old, perfectly healthy nurse die in five days from pneumonia. I've seen people die from exploded viscera. I've seen 1000-gram babies with so much dead gut that they'll never survive.
Sooner or later, you just get used to it. It's nothing magical; people do it all the time.
Re:solution: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:solution: (Score:2, Informative)
If you really don't know about /b/, just keep it that way. Trust me on this one. Really. You can live a happy and productive life without ever visiting /b/.
Don't go to /b/. Just don't.
Re:solution: (Score:3, Informative)
"...would immediately hit /b/ within 30 minutes of them leaving work. "
I've seen a couple of references to this "/b/"....what is this?
NSFW links, but not as bad as people tend to make out.
http://boards.4chan.org/b/ [4chan.org] The random board. A bunch of kids messing around basically.
http://boards.4chan.org/s/ [4chan.org] A good source of porn.
Both those boards get filled with spam, and some of the spam is advertising for child porn download services. In fact a lot of the spam is exactly that. The boards are moderated (sometimes) but the torrent of spam often gets ahead of the volunteer moderators. The landing page for 4chan and the other chans (7, 420, etc) advertise the boards they host. They target pop and counter-culture audiences. Its all very ad-hoc. Run on php scripts. There is no archiving or tracking of users. The low tech nature of the forums is one of the attractions for some people.