The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet 535
Cutting_Crew writes "Gizmodo has called attention to a story that describes the worst job you can get at Google: wading through and blocking objectionable content, which includes watching decapitations and beastiality. A ex-Google-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year-long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet. In the end, he needed therapy, and since he was a contractor, he was let go instead of being hired as a full time employee."
Lightweight (Score:5, Funny)
This guy gets paid to do what 4chaners happily do for free and he complains about needing therapy. .. On the other hand, I smell a crowd source opportunity.
Re:Lightweight (Score:5, Funny)
This guy gets paid to do what 4chaners happily do for free and he complains about needing therapy. .. On the other hand, I smell a crowd source opportunity.
You'd hire a 4channer to figure out what is objectionable?
Captcha: suicide ... et tu /.
Re:Lightweight (Score:5, Funny)
You'd hire a 4channer to figure out what is objectionable?
Sure, you just measure the time taken to view the image. If it's long enough to masturbate, it's objectionable.
Editors (Score:5, Informative)
Bestiality not beastiality.
Re: (Score:3)
Bestiality not beastiality.
I doubt that there's anything "best" about it.
Limit this to a few months + mandatory debriefings (Score:5, Informative)
An unnamed police department in the United States had a policy for child pornography investigators:
* You could only do it for a few months then it was someone else's turn
* You had mandatory psychological help
Oh, and you had to be trained ahead of time.
Re: (Score:3)
Actual *investigating* would be a far cry than just looking at images fly past your face.
In those cases the police get up and personal with what is going on, sometimes for months on end, the children and the offenders. They get involved. This is why they are effected.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if they are weak and had no business there in the first place.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to be a content moderator and then a trainer for content moderators, and I can tell you that it's slightly different. Child pornography investigators will spend a lot of time over a small amount of images, all of which are horrific. Content moderation is all about getting through a large amount of material quickly, most of which will turn out to be false positives.
Two months isn't an option. It takes a month to get up to an acceptable speed, and about three months to really hit your stride. You have
Re:Limit this to a few months + mandatory debriefi (Score:5, Insightful)
Just from my experience, i'm computer forensic investigator but not for police. However, i work with many ex cops and state police.
Few days once in a blue moon fine. But hypothetically the state police have had a bunch of these cases that I'm aware of. When I'm doing my thing if I run across CP i have to stop my investigation and turn it over to state police immediately. Am i'm not just talking about the CP you can Hash value out(known CP DL'd or w/e). Talking in my 5 years here, we've had 4 dealing with actual like abuse, personal pictures. And i don't deal with anything closely related to CP.
I'm sorry just even thinking about that/picturing it is horrifying to me anyways. If i had to see images all the time on that subject. Forget that.
similar story from 2010 (Score:5, Informative)
Here [nytimes.com] is a 2010 New York Times article on the same subject. Seems like not much has changed. Apparently a bunch of it is outsourced, which in addition to the nature of the work, leads to questions about content privacy, especially when some of the images being reviewed are non-public (e.g. stuff you've sent through Facebook messages).
On the other hand, I can see contracting this out (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of those sick-o jobs that messes with your brain so much that it's in your boss's and employer's best legal interest to NOT know what you did.
Can you imagine the lawsuits if Google DID have these guys on the payroll and, 5 years later, ONE of them went nuts-o and harmed another employee, and that employee was NOT aware of the attacker's previous job description? Google might win in the long run but they'd have to fight an uphill battle.
By making sure the person is never on the payroll and relying on the standard practice of only verifying employment dates, job titles/job descriptions, and eligibility for rehire to future employers, they've pretty much immunized themselves if one of there censors goes nuts and kills someone 5 years down the road.
Well, they have, EXCEPT legal theories of liability change over time and those changes have a way of biting you ex-post-facto.
Re:On the other hand, I can see contracting this o (Score:5, Informative)
Can you imagine the lawsuits if Google DID have these guys on the payroll and, 5 years later, ONE of them went nuts-o and harmed another employee, and that employee was NOT aware of the attacker's previous job description?
The risk is not employee on employee violence, it is risk of suicide.
Re:On the other hand, I can see contracting this o (Score:5, Funny)
isn't that employee on employee violence?
Re: (Score:3)
Not if they're contractors!
Re:Then don't hire suicidal people for this job (Score:4, Insightful)
As the actual submitter I'll post my thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Porn only effects people when contraception fails
Re:As the actual submitter I'll post my thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that a spelling error or not? As 'effect' is quite accurate in this case...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[citation needed]
Advertising, political campaigning, etc all have an effect on people. Why wouldn't this? However, censorship is not the right way to counter it.
Bloody hell ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, I figure if anybody had to do that for a year, they should be given a pension, a quiet place to get away from things, and a LOT of therapy.
I can't imagine being the poor bastard that has to look at the worst stuff on the internet. I've glimpsed enough to know that I wouldn't want to see any more of it. I'm frequently appalled at some of the things people choose to see.
I think even the law enforcement guys can get fucked up from this, and they understand the need for support systems. Your first job our of school? That would ruin you forever.
Re:Forever (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe not.
Agreed with a little help afterwards, you could pull ahead of it such that "nothing can shock you ever again". They do it in the Military all the time, though in a more physical style.
Re:Forever (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that if you take the most bad-assed military, police, or what have you ... unless someone has some serious issues of their own already which would make them enjoy it (which pretty much disqualifies them from doing the job), this kind of stuff 8 hours/day for a year is going to seriously fuck you up.
Unless you really want your military made up of vicious sadists, I completely fail to see how this kind of thing wouldn't cause lasting damage -- or at least the need for some heavy duty counseling and support.
That much exposure to every single horrible thing that ever gets filmed is bound to wear down anybody. And anybody it doesn't, likely scores in the very scary end of humanity.
I'll just leave this here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed with a little help afterwards, you could pull ahead of it such that "nothing can shock you ever again". They do it in the Military all the time, though in a more physical style.
The U.S. Army Reports Record High Suicide Rates for July [huffingtonpost.com]
Experts: Vets' PTSD, violence a growing problem [cnn.com]
Maybe not.
I hunt, and at one time was once involved in a VFD (Score:5, Interesting)
I hunt, fish and have been on scene for a few automobile accidents. I've seen what happens when a guy falls from 15 stories onto cement in a construction accident. I've gutted and eaten my share of game. I've familiar with the story of Timothy Treadwell. I know what bears can do to a skeleton, and I can imagine pretty well what that camp looked like. I've seen fire photos.
It's grisly, but it doesn't stay with me because -- and I know I'm venturing into the domain of poets here -- it wasn't Evil. I didn't hate the deer. No one pushed the construction worker. His coworkers mourned for him, and it seemed sad, but proper. Carnivorous predation -- including my own -- and accidents don't "haunt" me. They seem "natural," as poor as that word choice is. I've experienced accidents -- some that put me in a hospital bed with stitches -- but they didn't --- I don't know -- "stain my soul." How's that for florid prose?
I wish I had never seen the Daniel Pearl video. Not that I wish I could have remained ignorant, but I wish I lived in a world where it just didn't happen. That video stuck with me. That video bothered me. I've met grizzled old firemen who were disfigured in a fire while they saved lives. I've shaken the hands of the men, and the burn scars shine like God's own merit badges.
I've seen photos of women disfigured by jealous men. Context seems to be everything. Just looking at the photos of those poor girls twists my guts into a knot. Maybe it's because I'm a parent, but those kiddie porn photos the cops published where all the people were removed and only the background shown make me wish God had personally appointed me to Go Smite Someone. I know the rage is just a cover for the anguish those photos of Best Western hotel rooms cause me.
If I had to spend a year, eight hours a day, looking at the worst the world had to show me, I'd need a padded cell at the end of it, and I'm a man with some scars and some grey in his hair. Shame on Google for doing this to some kid fresh out of school and then flushing him like toilet paper at the end of it. When you're the Boss, you're responsible for your people, and anyone who could do this is a reprehensible human being.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't believe in good and evil, just ignorant and wise, smart and dumb, people who don't know what they are doing will do "evil" inane violent shit.
Then you're deluding yourself. Has it not occurred to you that there exist people in this world who kill merely for their own pleasure? In fact, not only do they enjoy killing but they know exactly what they're doing and even that society considers it to be "wrong" and yet they do it anyway. What else would you call that if not "evil"? If you don't believe in evil, then why not play the Ouija board just for the hell of it (pun intended) because evil doesn't exist, right? What could possibly go wrong, it's
Re: (Score:3)
No one is capable of objectively evaluating their own mental health.
This is the most insightful thing I've heard today so far. This is correct on so many levels.
Re:Bloody hell ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can filter it out when you get to see it every now and then.
Imagine having to watch one video after the other of people being maimed or killed, animals being abused, children being abused, most of them with a laugh track attached, and you have to do this for an average of forty hours a week for a year.
No, I doubt you would be able to just 'filter it out' in the long run, and if you ARE able to do that you're seriously not someone I want to know IRL. Humans are supposed to have emotions and empathy; a lack of both would be shown by being completely unaffected by such a job.
Re:Bloody hell ... (Score:4, Informative)
So people who work as EMTs or as nurses who have to actually talk to and care for victims, don't you think they'd have the worst PTSD of all? What about people who have to do autopsies?
You're incredibly naive. I'm an emergency physician. I'll bet I've seen more fucked up shit in one week than you will in your lifetime, unless you've served in the military in active combat, and even then I doubt you've seen the outcome of child abuse.
People in my line of work do get burned out, do get PTSD, and do require counseling from time to time, and we only see the aftermath. And we don't actually see the bad deeds happen. It's much easier to distance yourself from the events when you only have to deal with comforting the injured. I've been mugged at gunpoint and been struck on the head multiple times in the mugging, and that had me looking over my shoulder for years. It affected me more than all the other shit I've seen in my life combined.
Autopsies are pretty sterile things. I've been in on a few. Not a big deal. Dead body? Seen lots of those.
unsurprisingly tragic (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unfortunate google doesn't take better care of the people they hire for this work, given the job as described it's not really surprising it fucks a lot of people up. You'd kinda think there should be a fairly extensive training programme first, and then a coping programme after, if nothing else because you really need to weed out the ones who are there because they enjoy it.
Re: (Score:3)
You also need to have regular screenings so that you can see how it is changing people over time... and pull the plug on them sooner rather than later. I see the scenario as being more one of: contract for 1 year; screen at hiring, at start of job, after 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year. If at any point, their psych profile shifts in a statistically meaningful way, pull them off frontline work and get them doing any of the other jobs required in that department, at least until their profile stabilizes
Like reading every crappy /b/ thread (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds pretty crappy. My first thought was, "It's basically being paid to look at the very worst threads on /b/. And basically being unable to stop unless you want to be jobless."
They better have paid well, because while I consider myself pretty desensitized to a lot of things there's some stuff that still gets me (mainly involving permanent bodily harm like the Lamborghini Tool Pull from Jackass 3D).
He was let go? (Score:5, Funny)
In the end, he needed therapy, and since he was a contractor, he was let go instead of being hired as a full time employee.
Since Google doesn't do bad things, it was obviously his fault.
Cmon... Is 4chan really that bad? (Score:2)
Although I could understand if he had to read the new Digg.
I did this for a living (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a very large company and analysed data from network packet capture devices that would sift through data and find interesting items. It was quite a head job after awhile. So many people doing dumb things at work and getting caught. Reasonable seeming people looking at fucked up porn (men and women coworkers), people hooking up with random strangers in public restrooms (facilitating this online on their work computers, it happens alot), people having groupsex and viewing the photos at work (via web email), total perverts preying on teenagers (stockholm syndrome in full effect), really anything wrenched or nasty you hear about in the news is like the tip of the iceberg when given a large enough sample size of the general able populous. It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology. I wouldn't ever do that shit again, or anything close to it, but I have respect for people who do.
This is the problem. We want to hide ourselves from what humanity truly is but at the same time we want to act like we want to be open and accepting and to actually study humanity. You cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of people on this planet if not all people on this planet have some really ugly behavior. If we are ever going to truly know ourselves we have to know not just the good side but the dark side as well. So the fear of the darkside actually hinders us in understanding our species.
It'
Re:I did this for a living (Score:5, Interesting)
> It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology.
The fact that you think that, I view, as evidence that it may have tweaked your view of people.
One of the most interesting drug policy debates that I ever had was with a toxicologist at a major hospital. I don't remember the meat of the debate so much as the ending, her view was just...so dark. Thats when it hit me.... her only experience in this area, is in seeing the worst of the worst. She doesn't see the guy who gets stoned and eats some munchies. She sees the guy who tried to kill himself. She sees the guy who injected himself with an unknown dose of an unknown white powder in a bag, produced by god knows who, and is now having a life threatening reaction.
In short, the sample size that she has may be large, but, its all highly biased towards the absolute worst. A large portion of her professional career is dealing with people having serious issues beyond what even most drug users ever experience.
It is like you are looking at information thats coming through a filter. Its like sitting behind a big red gel filter...all you ever get is red light. Everything is shades of red. Its a distillation process....and you are sitting in the condenser. You make the boiling pot bigger and bigger, fill it with more of the same.... and what happens to the output? It goes up. The more you put in to distill, the more distillate you get out.... even if the overall rate of it is the same as it was before.
It doesn't say anything about the population as a whole except to help define the extremes in excruciating detail.... but the vast majority of "people" is not the extremes at all. Though, in many real ways, this is hardly unique. News is all rare events. Multiple murders, heinous crimes, anything that happens rarely for the size of our population. In fact, there is almost an inverse relationship to how many people are effected by something and how big of a story it can be.
Dissapointed (Score:2)
I have to imagine that I am far from the only one that is disappointed in Google. Perhaps I expect too much, but they are one company I would think better of than to do pull something like that. I normally have a lot of respect for them in most things.
Not surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
A few years back I worked at an early TV-over-the-internet company (this was pre-Netflix and the company didn't really catch on as it required set-top boxes).
While my job was fairly mundane (mostly setting up new storage filers), I often had to go into the recording room: studios would send us a bunch of movies, TV shows, etc. on non-copy-protected DVDs and a bunch of staffers would spend all day ripping these DVDs to our storage system. Each staffer had to ensure that the ripping was going well by reviewing all the content on a bank of 24 (6 rows of 4 monitors) small monitors.
About 10% of the content the company hosted (which was responsible for about 90% of its income) was porn. All pretty standard fare, really, particularly for the internet: the worst they had was some mild kink/S&M stuff -- all stuff you could buy at your neighborhood adult shop.
On its own and viewed in moderation, not really a big deal...but the staffers got a little warped after a year in the recording room, particularly when they'd have several monitors of porn, a few monitors of kids movies (e.g. Disney stuff), a few of various movies, etc. It wasn't so much that porn was bad, it was just that the juxtaposition of porn and all the other stuff is a bit off-putting, or so they said. I believe it.
I can't imagine the horrors seen by the content-review people on sites where media is uploaded by the public. Poor bastards.
So do Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Myspace, et al (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html [nytimes.com]
The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.
Re:So do Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Myspace, et a (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html [nytimes.com]
The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.
Not getting hired full time would probably piss me off more than anything else. If I had to sacrifice doing a job like that and got duped then I would be pissed.
I guess that means I have empathy for the employees.
Another tough job (Score:5, Funny)
Spare a thought for all those poor people at Comedy Central who have to watch Fox News all day in search of comedy material for Jon Stewart.
Google Abusing "Contractors"??? (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been a long-time problem with large corporations. IBM was famously caught at doing that, and so was Microsoft.
[irs.gov]The IRS has pretty clear guidelines about who is a "contractor" versus who is an "employee".
It appears pretty clear to me that Google is illegally calling employees "contractors" so they can be denied perks and benefits. Just like IBM was, and just like Microsoft was.
Re: (Score:3)
Here is the IRS link that was supposed to be included above. [irs.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
The IRS has pretty clear guidelines about who is a "contractor" versus who is an "employee".
The IRS auditors are understaffed and overloaded. Google has deep enough pockets to hire enough attorneys and auditors to make them wish that they hadn't bothered. No, the IRS is going to spend their limited time and money on softer and easier targets that are more likely to pay up quickly, not a large and politically well connected company like Google.
Re:Google Abusing "Contractors"??? (Score:5, Informative)
"I was wondering the same thing. Aren't there rules regarding employer responsibility? Surely such rules would apply to contractors as well."
It's not a cut-and-dried situation, but from what I have read, it looks to me like Google is pretty clearly over the line here.
Generally speaking, if you're a contractor, you have personal control over at least one, but probably all three, of the following things:
(1) What you charge for your work.
(2) The hours that you work.
(3) How you do your job. If you are a "contractor", you are presumed to already know how to do your job. If the company has to tell you how to do it, you're not a contractor, you're an employee.
Was this guy an "obscenity" expert before he was hired? Probably not. Google probably sat him down and said, "This is what you do, this is how you deal with violations, these are the hours you must do it in, and this is how much we pay.
Even if it's only for a year, that's not a "contractor". That's an employee. I think Google is really screwing up here, and they are bound to get caught at it.
The One Year Rule (Score:5, Interesting)
The story makes it sound like Google only uses contractors for this job because they know nobody could hold it down for more than a year. But it sounds more like Google is misusing contractors the way I've seen happen at many high-tech companies. Bad managers don't have it together well enough to come up with a proper plan for expanding their departments, so whenever they have a new project that needs heads they don't have, they hire some contractors. These are always hired under a time limit, to avoid a repeat of the Vizcaino v Microsoft [findlaw.com] lawsuit.
This ties in with one of my pet peeve with Google: they only seem to hire really brilliant people with great academic credentials who are never expected to bother themselves with scutwork. On the rare occasions when they realize that the scutwork can't be avoided (like manual crap filtering) they hire temps. Thus scutwork either doesn't get done or is done by people who aren't really a part of the employee community, and don't coordinate well with the real employees. That's why so many of their commercial products die on the vine, why so many of their products stay in beta mode for years, and why they have such abysmal documentation and tech support.
They did two things right: they came up with the best search engine ever, and they figured out how to make it generate huge tons of money. This allows the rest of the company to be run wastefully and ineffectively. The shareholders don't care for this, but the voting stock is controlled by a small cadre of insiders.
Ah, But I'm Stronger Than That (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why companies love independent contractors for this sort of job.
There are plenty of studies that show us just how very little self-awareness and self-control the typical person actually has. Virtually everybody thinks they're made of stronger mettle than the other guy; virtually everybody thinks they can handle pretty much anything life could throw at them. Nobody wants to believe that they're the person who'd crack under pressure; nobody wants to believe that they're the person who would keep walking past a mugging. People tend to think that the flaws and limitations of the human race are things that apply primarily to other people.
Successful companies know this; manipulating people is a key part of how a company becomes successful in the first place. Google knows that this kind of work will eventually destroy the mental health of the person performing the work. Why would they shoulder the responsibility for dealing with this fallout when they have a nigh limitless supply of perfectly unremarkable human beings who think they're strong enough to hack it?
Note that I don't condone this behavior in the least; I find it reprehensible. But we live in a world where personal responsibility, level playing fields, and common sense are sacrosanct, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Everybody thinks they're David; nobody ever considers the odds that they're one of the countless schmucks Goliath laid out before his ultimate fight.
censorship vs ? (Score:3)
Man eaten alive by lions in front of family [youtube.com] - yeah, WTF?
Guy has arm ripped off by crocodile [youtube.com] - ugly, but understandably uncensored
Not that you'd want to for the sake of viewing something repugnant, but keywords "Syria Violence" could lead very quickly to an appointment with a therapist. For example: Bodies of postal workers thrown from rooftops [youtube.com] -- and that is very mild compared to others, especially from Libya. ~ Those are the ones I must forget. As horrible as they are, I strongly believe they should not be censored, and many haven't been. Real events, however horrible, unless to protect privacy, should be left transparent. I admire the function implemented by Google which allows vids to be flagged as +18 Only, but I have also seen this option abused, misused, and sometimes 100% erroneously enforced. But at least it makes viewing certain content voluntary and comes with a disclaimer. That's fine. Censorship is not.
I can imagine viewing such things with any consistency could easily affect one's mental health, or even ruin someone's life. I am sure there are also many who could view such things over breakfast, lunch and dinner and carry on as normal. Certainly censoring bird song [slashdot.org] isn't difficult though, but I guess that's what AI is for.
What I'd really like see is a more thorough account of the real criterion for censorship at the Chocolate Factory. I've seen many examples of Google censorship which anything but fit the declared purpose. And then sometimes I am left completely surprised.
Yahoo used to (Score:5, Funny)
This is why Tech needs unions (Score:3)
This is why Tech needs unions so we don't have this contractor abuse as least obamacare gives them health care.
Occupational Health and Safety Administration (Score:5, Informative)
One word: OSHA. Much as Google may not like it, they're not exempt from workplace health and safety regulations. If those truly are the working conditions, the contractors need to have a good sit-down with one of the local OSHA inspectors complete with show-and-tell. Note: being a contractor doesn't change things, the regulations apply to the workplace and not just the employees.
Comment removed (Score:3)
LOTS of weird crap online (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people are more sick than you can imagine. You don't want to expose your kids to to the worst of humanity.
Why wouldn't legal porn and violence damage you? (Score:3)
But what about long-term exposure to perfectly legal images of violence? What about legal adult porn that is, by design, intentionally degrading to one or more of the actors in it? What about very detailed, explicit, gore and violence in video games?
I don't understand how or where one draws the line, if you think that there's some sort of boundary between the kinds of images that will affect your mental health and those that are perfectly benign. The generally supported reactions here seem to be "I know it when I see it, and boy is that stuff dangerous, at least over the long term." What's the difference between that position, and that of Jack Johnson or some puritanical-antiporn crusader?
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never done the job, but I can assure you that goatse is the very least of the what the internet has to offer in terms of disturbing images. Honestly, from what I hear about these jobs, the only people who can last long term and probably psychopathic to some degree or another: i.e. they have little to no empathy for others.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Funny)
Wanted: Individual to wade through the most depraved and terrible consequences of human imaginations known to man.
Requirements: Must be completely emotionless and unsympathetic to the human condition. Robots are preferred but not required. A J.D., M.B.A. or experience in government is also a plus.
Compensation: Competitive
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Funny)
Preference given to former US Congressmen or Senators. Seniority status a plus.
Re: (Score:3)
If you find such a job, let me know.
Re: (Score:3)
"...Oh.. and because this is Google... you also need a PHD in Physics"
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
A psychopath wouldn't be very good at such a job. He's look at a video of kittens being eviscerated and wonder why anybody would be bothered by it.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Informative)
That might be true with a psychopath but a sociopath (which is what the OP probably meant) would be quite capable of watching the videos and understanding how other people would react even if they don't react themselves. Sociopaths in general learn during their childhood to mimic empathy to fit in. The classic example is Ted Bundy, a perfectly (in public) outgoing and social individual who knew how to mimic empathy but in private was cutting people up to see what their insides looked like.
Psycopath == Sociopath (Score:5, Informative)
"Hare writes that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder." The term sociopathy may be preferred by sociologists that see the causes as due to social factors. The term psychopathy may be preferred by psychologists who see the causes as due to a combination of psychological, genetic, and environmental factors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy [wikipedia.org]
Research suggests that, “psychopaths are a stable proportion of any population, can be from any segment of society, may constitute a distinct taxonomical class forged by frequency-dependent natural selection, and that the muting of the social emotions is the proximate mechanism that enables psychopaths to pursue their self-centered goals without felling the pangs of guilt. Sociopaths are more the products of adverse environmental experiences that affect autonomic nervous system and neurological development that may lead to physiological responses similar to those of psychopaths. Antisocial personality disorder is a legal/clinical label that may be applied to both psychopaths and sociopaths” (Walsh & Wu, 2008).
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic-focus/2010/07/sociopathy-vs-psychopathy/ [psychcentral.com]
And if you want a bit more about the history of socio/psychopaths, reading this article [io9.com] about sherlock holmes not being a sociopath might also be helpful.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have to conceal their enjoyment. They just have to flag the "good" stuff.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually psychopaths are very good at adapting. Even though they wouldnt feel bad about kittens being eviscerated, they know the society expects them to, and they 'learn' to feel bad about it (or show that they feel bad about it). Most psychopaths learn at an early childhood stage, what they society expects and adapt (though you would expect their base instincts to come out depending on the circumstances (and also whether they did had a proper childhood, that trained them properly)).
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, as a necessary survival skill, the societally-functional psychopath/sociopath learns better than most people exactly what empathic reaction can be expected from a given situation. He wouldn't *feel* upset by the video but he'd understand on an intellectual level that watching baby animals being harmed upsets other people.
The big problem with assigning the job to a psychopath is that once you get past the gut check, true depravity tends to be creative and interesting. You really don't want to show a psychopath creative and interesting things that you'd prefer he not do.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps you're right about the sociopath's ability to do the job. Indeed, maybe they'd be more objective about it than a more empathic person.
And I wouldn't worry too much about feeding a crazy imagination. Anybody with access to Google (!) can do that without help.
Huh, we may have stumbled on a way for lifers to earn their upkeep....
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd think pediatric surgeons would be good candidates for such a job. They have empathy, but they have seen all that crap up-close, for the most part. Beaten kids, raped kids, systematically malnourished and otherwise neglected and abused kids, kids with amputations from farm machinery, etc. A friend of mine has been at it for almost two decades and she still cries every now and then, but not always at work. She cries when she sees perfectly normal, healthy kids. She is not psychopathic by any stretch of imagination. It's a job. Humans are the cruelest of the animals. Get over it or go crazy, your pick. Getting over it is not psychopathic, neither is it lacking empathy. Empathy doesn't mean you have to lose your wits every time you see abuse...
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Few people's backgrounds can immune you from everything you find.
After our spam filter stopped an important message, we took turns sorting emails for a few months until we got the filter tuned.
Trust me, it's not just kids/animals/fetish stuff. I went home many days feeling very disturbed. It bothers me to this day to remember, and I'm not at all a prude/religious person.
Trust me, there are things you just don't want to know about.
Actually, this is a common job requirement (Score:5, Informative)
My sister worked for the eBay thought police for several years. Mostly it was offensive images that people replaced on their web site in place of an existing image that someone else linked into an auction page so that they victim had to pay the bandwidth costs for the picture of the picnic table (or whatever), rather than the seller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking [wikipedia.org]
Apple employees who work with customer data in Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime, Logic Studio, and Aperture, as well as some other packages get to sign agreements about exposure to offensive material.
Adobe has similar agreements for employees who might be doing work on Photoshop for customer data.
If you're actually in the industry that generates the images in the first place, there are similar agreements.
I was at a startup that did web site reverse proxy caches for a while, and had a similar agreement; you can guess at the sites where you'd want the ability to carry heavy load on a landing page.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Poor guy...
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they never said, "Don't watch evil, did they?
Assholes and the coporations that love them (Score:5, Interesting)
But lets be fair, this isn't about Google being evil. It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line. Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening. They can send out all the memos and make rules until they are blue in the face, but at some point an employee chooses how to act, and the company can then react.
The real test is how Google reacts at this point. If they were really a 'good' corporation (whatever that really means), they would probably step in and help this guy out, while canning the person who fired him.
It kind of bugs me that people can't seem to differentiate between actions that employees of a corporation take, and actions that the corporation takes. (e.g. Microsoft buys companies. Microsoft employees disregard open XML standards.) This story seems like a perfect example of that.
Re:Assholes and the coporations that love them (Score:4, Informative)
Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening.
This isn't even baloney. It's olive loaf.
The way something like this works is that people have to collude. The way they collude is to use exactly the logic you have here: it's not *my* job to deal with the consequences. It's not *your* job. It's the job of someone not in this room.
The reason this is olive loaf is that everybody knows somebody has to do this job. Trace the chain of command up from this guy's boss, to the bosses boss and so forth. This is an important job. Someone fairly high up on that chain of command made sure it was getting done, and when he did, he must have known it was being done with contractors. That meant he made a conscious decision that this important job should be done by a low status worker which Google had no long term responsibility for. That person handed a "it's not my job" card to every manager down the line.
Any time you have someone who to all practical purposes looks like an employee, doing a permanent, line oriented job (as opposed to support like janitorial services), and that person is *not* an employee, there's something fishy going on.
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It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line.
If the corporation creates an environment where that manager is judge solely (or mostly) on the bottom line of his P&L, then they are engendering evil. Even a large corporation can put into place metrics and evaluation criteria which reward managers for making decisions that are profit neutral or profit negative in the short term, but that have other benefits, tangible and intangible, to the company outside of that manager's division.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And if a human were composed of multiple distinct entities, they could do that too! In fact, courts routinely allow this defense, called "Insanity". And the human can escape punishment also by going into therapy for rehabilitation - and for bonus points receives sympathy rather than condemnation from the general public for the original heinous action!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally! All those hours wasted on cracked.com pay off now:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18385_7-bullshit-police-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to-movies.html [cracked.com]
the Insanity Defense is attempted in less than one percent of all legal cases, which essentially means that more people have tried to pin their crimes on aliens or their evil twin rather than their own basket case, shoelace-eating lunacy.
Of that tiny fraction where the lawyer was even willing to try it, the defense is successful less than 25 percent o
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Why not hire someone who actually likes beastiality and decapitations? There must me loads of this kind of people judging from what is posted daily on 4chan.
Because they would have a vested interest in making sure those images and videos became as widely available as possible, which is probably counter to Google's goal here.
Re:A weak mind (Score:5, Insightful)
A weak mind? I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bet after watching this stuff for long enough it's going to have an effect on anybody but a sociopath. Then too, but they'd probably enjoy it.
Soldiers and police offices get PTSD. The cops who work on child porn and the like get worn down. Heck, I bet people who work in ERs get a little twigged on this stuff.
You immerse anybody in this stuff day in and day out, and I think it's safe to assume there's going to be some lasting trauma.
And I have to assume that anybody who would volunteer for this and thrive on it ... well, you need to keep an eye on them because they're probably dangerous.
Anybody who thinks simply being tough-minded (as opposed to being highly twisted) is all that it would take to "man up" and get past this is likely full of crap.
What you're seeing is 'the Just World" hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
The shrinks call it "the Just World" hypothesis.
When told a story about how something bad happened to a little child -- loss of a cookie, for example -- children in studies begin to imagine something similar happening to them. This causes mental discomfort, and they begin to look for ways this would NOT have happened to them. In the vast majority of cases, the children decide the cookie was lost because the victim either did something wrong or was something wrong (a bad child), so since the tested child is not bad and does not intend to do something wrong, then nothing bad will ever happen to them. The world is good, and only good things will happen to good children.
If you know a kid, try it yourself. Keep the story small -- lost a cookie, lost a toy -- so you don't traumatize the kid. :-) You'll be amazed at the lengths the kid goes to to insulate himself from the possibility.
You see this manifest in a million different ways in the adult world. Only bad girls get raped. Welfare cases are taking all our money. All car crashes were caused by stupid people. Unfortunate people are just "unlucky," and my luck is good.
Nurb432 doesn't like the thought that his job could use him up, break him, and then just throw him away. He tells himself stories about why this won't happen to him. He's not weak-minded. He's not weak. He's in demand. He manages his career wisely. He's the ant surrounded by grasshoppers. He's the Little Red Hen, and he'll laugh come winter.
Hint that Winter is Coming for all of us, and he won't thank you.
Hey, don't listen to me (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're telling a few too many stories, yourself. As well as making assumptions.
Cool. Don't take my word for it. Research it yourself. Here's a start [wikipedia.org].
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Everything is rooted in meaning. A person with a powerful capacity to invent personal context might be able to sustain a healthy personality for quite a while. They would need to know that human depravity has no bottom, and that what they are doing is a service to take said depravity out of the mainstream. Next, they would need to have a strong spiritual life, seeing the flesh as only meat, a vessel for the human soul, would reduce the impact of people doing terrible things to meat. Finally, they would have
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I have to totally agree, seeing it in pictures is far different than sitting there watching it happen in real life. In that case i may not use the 'weak mind' argument.
I know personally i have been in the position of 'reviewing' internally reported sites in a large corporate environment, and it didn't effect me in the least, i knew it was just a bunch of pixels on the screen and didn't change me in the least. Also i didn't take it home with me. I also didn't hate or enjoy, it was just my job at the time. Of course by the other guy's definition, that makes me a sociopath i guess.
Exactly the point I'm trying to make here. Some people know how to compartmentalize things in their mind, it's a skill and other people never can separate themselves from their work. Sometimes a job is going to be difficult, nasty, gross, painful, but there is a greater purpose for that sacrifice.
In this case it's moderating Facebook. If you have that job you have to see that content to protect other more sensitive minds from having to see it. In essence you're a soldier on the front line managing obscene c
Re:A weak mind (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can look at that sort of image and compartmentalize it as "just work," a "bunch of pixels on the screen," something is very wrong with you.
Anyone not like you must be defective! You didn't cry enough when you saw that image, you sociopath!
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I highly doubt (Score:5, Interesting)
The contract with Google forced the guy to stay there for a whole year.
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Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
If looking at kiddie-porn, or beheading, or whatever gory pics can made someone so f*cked up that he has to get a therapy I'll say that this guy is already f*cked up _before_ he got the job
you clearly lack basic knowledge of psychology.
Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you mean walked all over? This isn't lord of the flies. If someone is jerk I don't include them in my social circle and they certainly wouldn't be employed where I work. If they act violent I call the police. If they try and harm me in some other way I call a lawyer.
Can you give me an example of how someone with balls can "walk all over" a soft person in modern western society? (Without ending up in jail or the defendant in a lawsuit)
Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that repeated viewing of these kinds of images can de-sensitise a person enough to affect their personality.
A friend of mine is a child psychiatrist and she told me that the uk serious crimes unit have specialist child porn officers who have to sift through thousands of images on a day-to-day basis. They are only allowed to do this for a maximum of (if IRC) six months before they are taken off the job and a lot are given therapy because they become so traumatised by it.
They do this because they found that after a while people can not only become de-sensitised to it but they can actually start to be aroused and find they like what they are viewing.
Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Interesting)
In the first dot-com boom, I worked on a large groups application, kind of like what Google Groups is now. We had ~3m users, uploading thousands of images per day. For the first 6 months or so, it was the developers who had to do the moderation. We saw a lot of stuff that we could (and, frankly, had to) laugh about - anatomically impressive feats of stretching, comically ludicrous insertions, etc - but then there was the other stuff, the ones that you just couldn't laugh off. Stuff being done to others who clearly weren't old enough to consent. Some of the things I saw cannot be unseen or forgotten, however much I've wanted to in the ten years or so since.
After a while it does get you down. The very ordinariness of the backdrops was what got to me. People's ironing boards in the background. Their work uniforms hanging on the back of the door. You realise that this kind of shit is not done by crazed inbreds in the mountains or by foaming-at-the-mouth psychos, but by everyday people like the ones you sit next to on the bus or who smile at you as you buy a coffee from them every day. And that really got to me. I started looking at people and society very differently, and feeling constantly angry or sad.
In the end we hired a team of dedicated moderators, who had an enforced 1-to-1 counselling session every week. We also started working with law enforcement and people in suits whose cards just listed their job as 'the home office', and every now and again we'd get an email from the higher-ups telling us that our evidence had been crucial in securing a conviction in some case that had been in the news recently. And that helped.
There are far worse things on the internet than Goatse or tub girl, and a depressingly large number of people who produce them, consume them, and share them with others. Anyone who does that job for a sustained period has not only my sympathies, but my thanks
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Source: Talking to holocaust survivors who told me exactly those things.
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Mental issues are still often looked down upon as weakness in Western societies too. Sure you can pretend that nothing is bothering you, but that doesn't mean that you're not having problems.
In general I pity people who don't recognize that there actually are thinks like psychological problems. To me it seems they never loved, hated, hoped or felt anything, basically they didn't/don't live. If the meaning of live is just existence to them, they could inhume themself and make place for some rocks. Rocks last longer so they should be more valuable in their book.