The Worst Job In the Digital World 258
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports on one of the worst jobs in the digital world — moderating photos and posts on Facebook and other social networking sites flagged as unsuitable by other users. Last year Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid $1 an hour. 'It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,' says Derkaoui. 'And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.' Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. 'Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc,' says one. 'I left [because] I value my sanity.' Facebook's one-page cheat sheet lays out exactly what must be confirmed and deleted by the team. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities. Emma Barnett adds that although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users' personal details. 'Maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their "friends" – only to find that two minutes later it's being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.'"
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because if Facebook says something is only visible to "Me and My Friends", you'd expect them to be actually telling the truth.
Of course you and I know better now.
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Funny)
XOXO,
-The Facebook Team
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Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:4, Funny)
TFTFY
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That's quite naive though because that would mean their sys-admins could not see it if they needed to, also law enforcement(in which jurisdiction?); I'm not sure how you could legally or functionally achieve either of these.
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's quite naive though because that would mean their sys-admins could not see it if they needed to, also law enforcement(in which jurisdiction?); I'm not sure how you could legally or functionally achieve either of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption [wikipedia.org]
We have known for years that the sysadmins who run communication systems could potentially eavesdrop on us, which was one of the big motivations for public research on cryptography and public key encryption systems. I know, I know, "It's hard," "Ordinary people won't do it," "There are a million failure modes," but we are not trying to secure against nation-state intelligence agencies here. If Facebook were serious about protecting user privacy (not that anyone would expect them to be), they would have deployed cryptographic solutions to these problems long ago. If they want to be able to grant law enforcement access to these things, they can use a threshold system so that there is no single person who can read users' messages.
The reality, though, is that Facebook will only devote resources to giving users to appearance of privacy, because Facebook's entire business model is based on privacy violations.
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why crypto sorta works for web banking is you already have made the decision to trust your bank.
If you can't trust Facebook, Facebook deploying cryptography to stop FB from eavesdropping on users is a waste of time and resources for everyone including FB.
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I'm well aware of cryptography and encryption.
However I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply here. Please correct me if I'm wrong but the reason we can have things like secure passwords is that once encrypted, they are never decrypted. When i supply my password to a secure system it is encrypted at the time of creation and the hash stored. This then is checked against the re-encrypted version supplied every time a person check it.
To perform a private/public key check on photos you want to share with a sel
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Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:4, Insightful)
sysadmins are not able to see passwords because it is possible to encrypt them before they are sent to the central server. passwords are never actually decrypted in order to authenticate them.
photos that have to be shared would have to be decrypted at some stage. If the 3rd party you are sharing with could see them then so could the sysadmin.
Now unless you wanted to encrypt every photo independently with every person you share it with's public key, but that would be very inefficient.
Also in that case who would you police things like bullying? now you may argue that it is not the place of a website to do that, but (for example) I would expect a pub landlord to monitor his premises for illegal activity, so why not a website/forum?
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Not sure if you're dense or trolling...
Passwords can be hidden completely from sysadmins because they're being provided by the user each time. You don't need the ability to decrypt the resulting data because you're just checking the existing encrypted blob against the new one - if they match the password is right.
Photos and status updates don't work that way.
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does that mean the enemy of facebook's enemy is also my friend?
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Informative)
Because if Facebook says something is only visible to "Me and My Friends", you'd expect them to be actually telling the truth.
They may be telling the truth; from TFS
moderating photos and posts on Facebook and other social networking sites flagged as unsuitable by other users.
I may be wrong but it seems to me, one of your 'friends' would have to mark it as unsuitable first. This is a pretty much universal rule whether online or in meat-space. If you tell a friend a secret they may tell someone else your secret.
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News to me. Has it been publicly confirmed anywhere else that this goes on? Sure, it was always a good guess but still, even from this article it's not clear they're just going through private content on a whim. It sounds like it needs to be flagged first so I guess the other lesson is choose better "friends".
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Interesting)
even from this article it's not clear they're just going through private content on a whim.
Well, perhaps this article from 5 years ago will help to clarify the issue for you:
http://gawker.com/315901/facebook-employees-know-what-profiles-you-look-at [gawker.com]
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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and never use Twitter
You don't use Twitter because they might misuse your private data? Can you even post something privately on Twitter?
Re:So the moral of the story is... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not, but this is part of why I left Facebook (as an employee). I've whined about it anonymously here for a couple years.
Even if you have a photo 'private', if it is reported, screeners will have access to it. We had one screener, who was found to be taking USB thumb drives of pictures home from the internet cafe where he worked, all pornographic. There have been cases, nothing major, where pictures leak out to the internet through these means. Nobody was willing to do anything about this gaping security hole.... infuriated me.
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Combine this with the fact that if these people are doing this job, they probably need the money and are going to be unwilling to take risks. Sure, there are some who are in for criminal gain. Just like it is crazy to give a credit card to any person who takes it out of your sight, even for a second.
Th
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Well, I don't know about whether or not you should have been modded down, but I do think there is an distinction between Facebook and "the internets" in general.
Facebook is designed to find out about you. It knows what you like, who you like, where you are and when you were there and most times even how you got to where you are. It stores your photos, your random thoughts and even your aspirations. This is far different from the vast majority of the internet, but you are right that at least Facebook IS m
Moose knuckles (Score:2)
I've never heard that one before, not sure I should look it up at work either :)
flag en masse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:flag en masse (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:flag en masse (Score:5, Interesting)
This is sometimes called "hellbanning", the user continues seeing content but his/her actions are ineffective (on some forums the user sees his/her own posts but others do not see them, thus giving the user the impression of being ignored by everyone).
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The unmentioned pain for reviewers is the realization that all of the people in the pictures have way more money than they have and are still obviously living empty, miserable lives.
facebook cheat sheet (Score:2)
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
If your job is to review an endless stream of too-nasty-for-facebook stuff, and you live in a slightly puritanical jurisdiction, I imagine that you could relatively easily end up handling a fair amount of material that is theoretically illegal, if not necessarily well enforced(and, unlike the higher-ups at facebook HQ, who probably benefit from the 'obviously, we are just screening material in order to hand over anything wicked to the cops' presumption, it might not be easy for Joe Temp to prove that he is just doing his job)...
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
Conversely, I wonder if people specifically seek out this kind of job for an excuse to access this material. That whole no background check/criminal check thing worries me a little more than the privacy concerns.
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
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need the job, and people who are entirely too happy about what they do(and, if you are running hackedFBchix.cx on the side, the buck an hour is just a bonus)...
Just wanted to let everyone know that hackedFBchix.cx is available! Inconceivable!
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at a Moderation company in Australia processing similar pictures/text to this. This was an issue that came up regularly but which we couldn't get an answer from our legal team.
The general issues are:
-We had to view blatantly illegal material in the line of our job.
-The servers were often in the USA/Europe, so the company technically transported child porn across international borders. (unencrypted no less)
-Even after it's been marked as illegal, action taken, and maybe even sent to the authorities, the original copy is not deleted. It's marked as deleted but still stored in that big old database.
-Police forces around the world want you to keep a copy. If a user posts illegal material, the police want a copy of it. If the police request information about somebody after they bust a child porn ring, saying 'we wipe everything illegal - sorry!' just doesn't cut it.
If authorities combed through their picture database, they'd find tens of thousands of illegal to own that have been transported across borders. IANAL, but it does sound very tricky.
Re:facebook cheat sheet (Score:4, Insightful)
"foreplay allowed.... even for same sex (man-man/woman-woman)" - I'm glad they clarified that...
Same sex does not necessarily mean same species.
Psychological support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Psychological support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Farming it out to third-party contractors in uncontrolled working conditions (including internet cafes, apparently?) also seems to fail to uphold at least the spirit of their privacy policy. It's one thing to delete a nude photo that violates FB's privacy policy, and another thing to send it outside of Facebook's offices to third parties with nothing stopping them from saving it locally.
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Is Facebook avoiding this moral duty by farming it out abroad?
Is Facebook a corporation?
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All offshore outsourcing is about avoiding moral (and legal) duties to US employees.
What about the benefits package? (Score:3)
A buck an hour ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the face of globalization, where the rush to the bottom has given us jobs that pay only 1/10 of a McJob.
We've already seen this with programers. If it's in an O'Reilly book, it will be outsourced, crowd-sourced, off-shored, whatever it takes to drive the cost to as near to zero as possible.
Welcome to the future, brought to you by the internet and the law of unintended consequences.
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Welcome to the face of globalization, where the rush to the bottom has given us jobs that pay only 1/10 of a McJob.
I'm pretty sure that in Morocco McDonald's doesn't pay 10$/hour. Even here in eastern Europe they only pay about 2$/hour.
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Re:A buck an hour ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's face it, what is really happening is that US'ians are really starting to learn that they aren't WORTH 10 times the amount as citizens from other countries. Regardless of how much money you want for your unsustainable lifestyles you really aren't worth it.
Re:A buck an hour ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to weigh in with an insensitive elitist perspective, but this 1/10th of a McJob salary is injecting money into an economy that wouldn't have it otherwise. If you're a champion of economic equality, it's better for them to get some pay than none at all, especially when that money is coming from outside the country.
Pity about the type of work they're offering. I'd be in favor of requiring companies that export this kind of crap work to also export decent (more desirable to the local population) work to the same labor pool.
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No, it is not always better to accept some pay rather than none. If you get laid off from a decent job, you don't take a minimum wage grind-down right away, you spend that time looking for another decent job, because the long-term results are better.
Developing nations would do better if they could develop their own industries, rather than being use
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Yeah, it's much better if they exploit their own cheap exploitable labor instead of letting some rich bastard in another country do it.
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Your whole post assumes that the people in developing countries are making non-optimal decisions (i.e. they have the capability/skills to develop their own high end industries) because someone in a first world country is providing them low wage jobs.
Hint: Most of them are not that stupid to take $1/hour jobs if there are any better alternatives.
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I'm all for the globalization thing, but I think a country needs to take care of itself before it can take care of others. Part of that responsibility should extend to companies as well. Why should we even allow them to send out jobs to other countries when our unemployment is so high?
It's (practically) slavery all over again. Is it really much better to run someone for $1/hr. / 12 hours a day compared to having them as actual slaves? Sure it's a few steps up the ladder, but only enough to keep Amnesty Inte
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Those "third-world people" are grateful for the income, and I'm grateful for the prices this practice makes possible. It's a win-win.
You'll be grateful right until the point where your own job is the one that's outsourced. Then you'll suddenly find that the prices this practice makes possible are not all that affordable when you're working for the same wage as the guy your job was outsourced to. End result, you both end up earning less. Guess who pockets the difference?
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Those "third-world people" are grateful for the income, and I'm grateful for the prices this practice makes possible. It's a win-win.
I believe similar arguments were used by slave holders who were certain that their African slaves were surely glad to be out of the "savage lands" and living on good ol' America soil.
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Completely unshockingly, people in positions not experiencing strong downward pressure from globalization tend to be quite philosophical, even stoic, about the downsides and nearly rhapsodic about the upsides.
For that reason, the opponent of globalization might find no tactic more effective than identifying the intersection between 'people whose livelihoods are c
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Being against globalization (and/or automation) is like looking at a car with faulty brakes and fix it by removing the engine.
We have the potential of doing the necessary political and social reforms to ensure much higher worldwide prosperity, but globalization opponents prefer to condemn hundreds of millions to abject poverty because it's easier to just ban offshoring.
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Re:A buck an hour ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The 'gains from trade' argument certainly offers a strong foundation for the position that globalization can deliver greater overall wealth; but the domestic experience, at least, has been that the income distribution skews even faster than the pie grows. It's not a huge surprise that this leaves those holding a smaller slice looking back fondly on the days when they had a bigger slice of a smaller pie...
Re:A buck an hour ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the future, brought to you by free trade agreements and completely intended consequences.
FTFY.
Arguments in favor of completely removing all tariffs on Chinese imports occurred in the 1980's and were passed in the 1990's. Then Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers was giving talks about how globalization ought to be applauded because it made things more efficient (i.e. cheaper) and how it would ultimately benefit Americans because they could pay 15 cents for stuff at Walmart that used to cost 85 cents at the local general store. Both parties were all in favor of increasing the number of available H1B visas, and for making the process convoluted enough that large American firms would have the "efficiency" of hiring people who couldn't make a fuss about low pay or working conditions without risking getting deported, while the smaller firms couldn't jump through the necessary hoops.
This wasn't an accident or an unintended consequence - it was the direct and stated goal of the economic policies of George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama.
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False premise. The employer also has the option of figuring out a way to increase that same job's productivity so that it now becomes profi
Human filters have it bad all over (Score:5, Informative)
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Perhaps we could get criminals to look over the images - we could strap them down in chairs and keep their eyes open with prongs, while playing Beethoven.
I call it.... the LudoPhotobucket technique.
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How do you get a job like that anyway? I kinda want to try it after seeing it come up in the news so many times. I realise that I'll be scarred after maybe a week, but it's something that I'd like to say I've done.
Hang out on /b/ for a week. After a while, the subliminals will start to make sense. You will know who to call.
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Speaking of which, it sounds like they could get the job done for free by just making the live stream into an appropriately named image board with up/down mods and tags, and watching for the tags...
Where is the link to flag ... (Score:2)
A post/image as inappropriate?
A few days ago I wanted to do this to some bestiality that someone has posted and the only thing I could find was "mark as spam".
Re:Where is the link to flag ... (Score:5, Funny)
Bestiality may be distasteful, controversial, and potentially unethical; but spamming is just plain evil.
So.... (Score:2)
And as usual the people who most need to know won't find out, and the people who already hate Facebook or unabashedly love all news technological will be worrying/whining about it for a week or two.
Slow news day?
Drug war (Score:5, Funny)
drugs (apart from marijuana) ... are all banned
Personally I think that aspirin should be allowed too, but I guess I'm a bit of a radical.
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I was actually somewhat surprised at the casual wording in this document.
I guess it's a cheat sheet, but still..
If you're posting porn online.. (Score:3, Insightful)
then you don't deserve any privacy to begin with.
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Pssst - You can make porn of people other than yourself.
They even have a word for the people who do that on a regular basis - "photographers".
So, in other words... (Score:2)
Wow. I'll sleep better now. You bet.
Too true (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a company that is outsourced by one of the bigger news sites here in Poland and, although I only moderate comments on news items, i can fully confirm that this is one of the worst jobs you can have. Sure, we work shifts, so we have some limited control over whether we have to get up early in the morning or work nights (four this month for me), but the pay is ridiculous (about 330$ a month - lowest legally allowed pay grade in Poland) and the amount of work is sometimes staggering. But that isn't really the problem.
The problem is the kind of shit you have to sift through. I mean, sure, I'm used to dickheads on the 'net, but this is the biggest, saddest collection of misanthropes I've ever seen - not even 4chan comes close (i used to be a regular lurker, stopped some time around the Habbo raids). This being people of my nationality adds further injury and shame. But dickheads being dickheads, there isn't really a lot to tell - we all know or met them at some point. But then there are the special ones. Let's evaluate the most popular personalities:
1. The hyper-national. Everything Polish is good, everything not-Polish is bad. Uses terms like "True Pole", throws a shit-fit every time someone calls him on his no-true-scotsman nature. Accuses everyone of being either a traitor (favourite target: emmigrants) or an SB Agent.
2. The religious fanatic. Every news item is his private piece for preaching and he enjoys lambasting people for "not keeping the faith". His favourite are scientific, astronomic and health-related items.
3. The armchair politic. Knows everything there is to know about the complex social and geopolitical problems the world faces and offers simple, one-point solutions to every one of them. Rages uncontrollably when someone offers a counter-argument, not to mention when he is proven wrong.
4. The racist/antisemite. Every negative event in the world is caused by Jews and they're all secretly plotting to make us their cattle to be used and abused as they see fit. Frequently cites the faked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, uses crappy YouTube movies with no sources, or indeed any truth in them, to "prove" his point. Everyone disagreeing with him is either a Jew or their pawn.
These are just the most basic sampling of commenters, but when thrown all together, we get a critical mass, which I then have to clean up. Every news item becomes a political battlefield between the commenters, even purely scientifical ones. And they resort to such underhanded tactics in insulting one another that sometimes you just sit there, looking at a post and wonder what kind of a person could come up with this.
After working here half a year, I'm beginning to have a hard time telling sarcasm apart, and my cynicism shot way up. It's not apocalyptic to my sanity yet, but I already feel the influence. God help me if I ever will be transfered to monitor user-uploaded material (photos).
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Interesting... I never thought about how emigrants could be viewed as the problem rather than immigrants (I live in the US, everything here is the immigrants faults :( ), but the idea of "you abandoned us!" Makes total sense.
Re:Too true (Score:5, Interesting)
It's part of a lingering sentiment in Poland in the last 10 years, ever since we joined the EU. To explain it properly I'll need to focus a bit on how a typical young adult perceives our country.
You see, in the last 30 years we've barely kicked out communism from our doors through the SolidarnoÅÄ (Solidarity) movement. But the leaders of the Party weren't permanently barred from politics in Poland, leading to some discontent. They managed to go back to leadership through democratic vote and have been blamed for "destroying Poland" ever since. While it's true things are very hard here for the average Pole, but most of it can be traced to both tough economic transformation and high rates of corruption. This, in turn, caused a very cynical outlook in people growing up in the transformatory period, with financial success looked upon with suspicion and distrust. Because of these hardships, emigration is often seen as a "rescue" from this and most of our educated have already decided to leave our country. Most of our best healthcare personnel left the country to seek better wages, causing our hospitals to be terribly understaffed and underpayed. This is where the "traitor" thing comes in - people accuse emigrants of "leaving us to our fate", further cementing our economic and political hardships, "diluting our blood" if you will.
I don't agree with this sentiment, but I can see the reasoning standing behind it. What is most often forgotten by those representing this view, however, is that many of those emigrants send money back to Poland to their families, thus allowing them to buy more, in turn strengthening our economy, but such things are unfortunately unaccountable, so there are no ways of determining how much of an impact this has.
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The people who accuse emigrants of treason just rub me in all the wrong ways possible. Their worldview implies that you're supposed to be imprisoned in a country simply because that's where you were born and schooled. If a country can't figure out how to retain or even re-immigrate the bright/successful emigrants, it's not the emigrants' fault, sorry. Most of Eastern Europe had essentially closed borders for quite a while, and people had to literally escape to the West. Those treason-accusers believe that's
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It doesn't work that way in Poland, unfortunately. That's par for the course in a high corruption country. The first problem is that nepotism is the standard and basic method of hiring - nothing can be done about that, since this is still old-system thinking. A whole generation needs to pass through for this to change.
The other problem is that businesses often don't know what level of expertise they really need from their workers, leading to a totally absurd situation, where you employ Masters to do work su
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I'm guessing the OP really meant "immigrants". Either way, this post exhibits better English than 99.9% of native English speakers are capable of. I'm not exagerating in the slightest. Color me impressed.
Incidentally, I think they have hit on the reason why Americans, famous for being "sarcasm imparied", are that way. We just have way more nutjobs over here. So when someone says something completely assenine, sarcasm isn't nearly as safe a bet as it might be in other places.
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Sorry, I really meant "emigrants" - that double m sort of snuck through ;) . My sibling post earlier describes the sociological problem that stands behind it.
Also, "scientifical". Gah. That's what you get for not reviewing what you wrote.
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Might just be a typo in the grand parent's post.
That was my first thought, but he talked specifically about "traitors", which would certainly apply to emigrants, and not immigrants.
... Accuses everyone of being either a traitor (favourite target: emmigrants) ...
4Chan *shiver (Score:2)
Re:4Chan *shiver (Score:5, Insightful)
So... Is all that illicit content... (Score:2)
...routed to break.com? That would explain a lot...
I work at Facebook (Score:3, Interesting)
It's surprising the number of devs you hear joking about seeing "JB"... A bunch of 20-something guys with unlimited access to much of the worlds "private" pictures, isn't always a great idea...
Ear wax? (Score:3)
Seriously? Lot of ear-wax fetishists out there, to the point they need a rule banning its depiction?
"Crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing"
Because, y'know, a completely flattened dead cat ("Deep flesh wounds are ok to show") couldn't possibly offend anyone, while showing a packet of chicken livers at the grocery store borders on mass-murderer territory?
"Maps of Kurdistan (Turkey)"
Just - What? And this counts as an "escalated" offense? Hell, the entire "IP Blocks" section pretty much reads like the antithesis of Facebook's sole positive contribution to society - Its ability to help organize people against their governments.
I think I need to go make a facebook page full of flattened dead cats - All named Ataturk, whatever the hell that means.
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"Crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing"
Because, y'know, a completely flattened dead cat ("Deep flesh wounds are ok to show") couldn't possibly offend anyone, while showing a packet of chicken livers at the grocery store borders on mass-murderer territory?
Known as the "cartoon rule" or perhaps "looney tunes rule" if you like. any amount of folding, spindling, or mutilation is acceptable so long as there is never any gore.
yes, the pay sucks! (Score:3)
As I explained the "inter" nets to my mother (Score:5, Informative)
$1 an hour (Score:5, Insightful)
there's plenty o'people would do it for free
Worst job except this one... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities
Surely the californian employee who only gets to see the very worst of these pictures every day must have a worse job than the people who also get to filter all the nice pictures.
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Help these poor people (Score:5, Funny)
I've done this - over third shift, no less (Score:5, Interesting)
This was an unofficial duty that I had while working third shift at a web hosts - Granted, it was more researching complaints of abuse as well as law enforcement requests, but there were many users who had forum software that would get "overrun" with rather graphical posts. The company basically contracted out moderation services to these customers, and passed it off to third shift - We were to patrol these forums, and deal with objectionable content. Now, we didn't get $1 an hour, we DID at least get something that barely beat unemployment, but it still wasn't enough given the effect that the job had.
There were funnier sides to this, though.
We didn't have any great spam controls at the time other than PCRE filters... So one job was going through the hostmaster/postmaster emailboxes, and looking for spam patterns, and creating rules around them. The problem became how to prevent spam without blocking legitimate email that may be mentioning viagra or fisting. Having your female boss walk into a conversation in which you are discussing the fact that someone could legitimately be sending an email with the subject line of "fisting sluts" is always a good time.
Also, they wanted to launch an international video dating website - this was pretty early on, when the tech was new. Pretty standard dating site stuff at the time, except you could record your own video to include with it, with some "cutting-edge" webcam app. These videos had to be approved before they went live. And that job went to? Yep, me. I handled most of the backend server work and some custom PHP code, and this was my reward - Moderation.
This drove home a fundamental difference in how the genders handled dating sites at the time... The womens ads were generally approved, as they were almost always very tasteful- Fully clothed full body views, or simply a talking head, while they talked a bit about themselves, their interests, and what they want in a partner. This was what we encouraged, and was in accordance with guidelines. This part wasn't so bad - You got to hear a lot of fun stories from different cultures at best, and at worst, it would be in a language you didn't understand.
Now, that was the women. The men? Sure, they talked about themselves the same way, and had the same distribution of stories, but the overwhelming majority of the video was unclothed lower torso at best, and feverishly masturbating at worst. This was not a small percentage, it was BY FAR the majority. There's something seriously bizzare about hearing someone talk about loving walks on the beach or whatever, while there's a camera focused on an erection.
So that was third shift - click, penis, reject. click, pantless sweaty guy, reject. click, tasteful ad, approve. click, fat hairy abdomen and rapid motion, reject, and now eye bleach. And so on.
It was that and the spam filtering for the majority of third shift - A good solid 9 hours of offensive imagery, spam headers and penii, which lead to a rather warped view of the world outside of work.
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With Slashdot's new "Flag comment as inappropriate" feature
That would leave about 10% of the comments left on any given thread. And even those will only still be there because the moderator is too fucking stupid to appreciate irony.
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Can you imagine a group of low-payed men sitting behind a monitor trying to figure out whether a picture of a nipple bulge is male or female?
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There's gotta be some way to genocide all the Puritans ...
I've tried every legal character so far, and I just keep getting the rock piercers and such.
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BRING IT ON FAGETS
Why would you want it brought on top of fagets? Is that your "thing"?