/ Maggie Koerth-Baker / 10:19 am Mon Jul 19, 2010

A job only a troll could love

Forget postal workers. In the coming decades, I predict that Internet Content Reviewer will become the job synonymous with massive, homicidal mental breakdowns. For $8-to-$12 an hour, these workers review images and videos flagged for questionable content on social media sites. Kids sign on thinking they'll get paid to look at porn all day, and quickly find themselves in way, way over their heads. Counseling is part of the standard benefits package.

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  1. Oh, god. This is horrible to think about. I was just reflecting that moderators must have a hard time keeping people in line but this is nightmare stuff. I could never do this job. How do you sleep at night after seeing the worst of humanity before your very eyes?

  2. I consider myself fairly jaded, but I don’t think I really want to know what kinds of things they have to look at. I’d imagine it’s like looking at the id of the entire world, with all of its monsters.

  4. i have a friend who did this for vh1’s reality series forums for a year and who has been in a deep, deep misanthropic depression ever since.

  5. I was thinking the same thing. When I saw the post I thought, meh, I could do it. I’ve seen it all.

    But maybe because I’m tired it didn’t occur to me what sort of images we’re talking about here. The things we generally don’t see because someone has already removed them.

    Anything horrible involving children or animals I can do without. $10-$12 an hour for potentially damaging you for life?

  6. I hope some of the images described in the article are forwarded to law enforcement.

    Nevermind 4chan, this sounds decidedly ogrish.

  8. “””
    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,”
    “””

    This can’t be true. Please tell me they aren’t hiring people for this job who don’t even know how to find porn on the Internet, and think this is how it’s done.

    1. I think the point is rather that these people think they’re going to get paid to look at porn, not just *getting to* look at porn.

  9. What I found most intriguing is how much this reads like a snippet of speculative fiction, like something that could have been written twenty years ago in anticipation of a future we could only just barely see on the horizon at the time. It seems almost hyperbolically dystopic, but on the other hand, we’ve all had those “cannot be unseen” moments, and just imagine that being your whole life.

  10. Hmm, it’ll probably be a long time before something like this can be automated: the key feature the company is exploiting is these people’s moral center, their decency, their “humanity”. Super hard to teach a machine to do the same.

  11. I moderate a forum and am a member of a few more that i partake in regularly. Honestly there’s nothing image and video-wise that people can post that i would consider disturbing enough to stress me out.

    What i would consider truly out of control is the though of trying to moderate posts. From either out-of-control trolls, attention whores, and depressed suicidal people. These are things that truly are difficult to handle, and i can’t imagine trying to deal with it on a daily basis.

  12. For bonus irony points, can we get another post today promoting TOR? Haven’t had one of those in a while.

    Seriously, yes, that job will seriously affect your outlook on humanity. I didn’t even do anything quite that relentless, and it was still very discouraging to do a job that exposes you to just a fraction of the nastiness out there. I’m glad I’m not doing it anymore. It’s one thing to believe in the depravity of man, it’s another thing to have it shoved in your face on a regular basis.

  13. I dunno, I worked at a “waste transfer station” (ie, town dump) summers in high school, and while you never stopped scrubbing thoroughly when you got home, you got used to the smell pretty fast.

    I spent a fair amount of time in IRC and other internet chat rooms growing up.

    I work for an ISP’s abuse department now, scanning spam complaints for indicators common to phishing or other, more-serious, like-spam-but-more-than-just-spam internet abuses.

    The problem’s going to be more like this: you’ll start thinking things like “huh, how is a hand-drawn cartoon of a minor being sexually abused really child porn? I mean, it’s sick, but no children were harmed,” or “hah hah, more tentacles? where will they think to put those, next?”

    And the line from the Vice President lady, who only has to personally review the worst images, talking about how it’s hard to put them out of her mind? Pardon my French, but fuck her: that’s the same thing any middle- to upper-management prick who doesn’t have to do the day-to-day thinks when they’re forced to confront the reality of it on short notice. I used to work in tech support, and we’d have customers waiting 14-20 days for a repair call, and we’d get screamed at for hours and hours by people who just wanted what they paid for to work, but no matter how much we complained, it didn’t make a difference. Then you see one of those upper-management yahoos have to answer questions for the news, or you see a show like Undercover Boss, and they’re suddenly horrified.

    Fuck you, and your shriveled little Monkeysphere. The world is full of hate and evil and even these content-reviewers are still only getting the tip of the iceberg, the stuff that people are stupid enough to post to major social networks. How much worse do you think it is on IRC nets where people are doing direct file-transfers to each other, or places where no one’s concerned about uploading the file instead of just keeping it for themselves?

    Like Bill Hicks said, “Go back to bed, America.”

  14. Anyone who has sysadminned will recognise the situation.

    There is no amount of money that compensates people for policing this … phenomenon.

  15. One of my first computer jobs was reviewing content for LinkExchange back in the 90s. Early banner ads. Lots of them linked to softcore porn sites and the like. I would look at hundreds of questionable sites a day. It was actually one of the easier and more fun jobs I’ve had — kick back, listen to music, and click click click.

    Never really encountered anything truly vile though. But the internet is a much different place nowadays, I guess.

  16. I had a job that involved looking at porn (verifying automated pinklisting algorithms). After a while it’s all just pink. Not at all interesting.

  17. I goatsed. I participated in tubgirl photoshop contests. I saw the facesofdeath and the bumfights. I saw the worst of somethingawful and followed it into the far worse depths of 4chan, and I’ve emerged relatively unscathed.

    But show me a picture of a cockroach crawling out of someone’s mouth or those horrid flies/maggots that live beneath the scalp, and I will cover my eyes and shake. Why bugs? WHY?

  18. Sounds like something I would sign up for. I already see a therapist. All I need is a God complex and I can get paid for the infinite amount of free time I have. XD

  19. Several years ago I was a moderator for a pretty popular Matrix forum and one night we underwent a troll attack from some bored members of a professional wrestling forum. (god that sounds silly.) The attack consisted of about a dozen profiles posting ogrish pictures for hours on end. There were about 8 of us moderators who spent several hours combing the forum and purging it of the pictures they’d posted and banning profiles. I saw all the things lasttide mentioned above and more and man I wish I could “unsee” some of that crap!
    There is no amount of money that me intice me to do that job.
    “The Horror. The Horror”

  20. When I worked in the hospital, I had to spend a hour or so looking through the file of pictures of dead, deformed babies (six legs, no heads…) to find a misfiled photo.

    1. Ewwww. Speaking of which, every time I check out /b/ I’m usually confronted with repulsive images of gore (that’s what gets to me, never mind the other crud). So the job of “Internet content reviewer” sounds awful, especially if it involves images.

      (P.S. I apologize for poking at you the other day.)

    2. One of my old customer worked as photographer in pediatric hospital. One of his job was to photograph all the unusual births.

      He had to quit doing this, as he began to think that all newborns looked like those in the photos you had to sort through.

  21. Think of the blog fodder! A year of doing it, collecting stories and images, posting them to your blog, and BAM: a book deal!

  22. What about when its not pics or video anymore but your a “virtual reality content reviewer” ?

  24. What disgusts me is that people are disgusted by this. It’s not as if there is a League of Perverts plotting things to “cross the line”; these are your fellow humans here. Yeah, it’s gross, but so are we. They post that stuff to get a rise out of people, but they wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t human. Gross stuff happens, and people will try to take advantage of it. Ce la vie humaine.

    My partner is a call-taker/dispatcher for 911, and she doesn’t just see photos that have been endlessly repeated, she gets to hear it on the phone live. There are two types of calls that take her to the edge of human experience: 1) the brutal stuff: calls of people committing suicide, slicing themselves up during meth psychosis, beating their supposed loved ones. And, 2) the callus “normal people”, who call to complain that the cops haven’t been out to handle their noise complaint, 3-day old theft report, or to come and collect fingerprints in the case of their daughter’s friend’s boyfriend who took their cell phone and won’t give it back. All of which, they would be happy to deal with, if category #1 would stop for five minutes.

    The Internet, like real life, only gets to be a safe, manicured garden because people are willing to not only pick up the phone and talk to the things that you don’t want to witness, but go out there and clean it up while you’re asleep. That’s life. The fucked up part is that they only pay people minimum wage to do it.

    Frankly, I’m glad that my partner has the fortitude to do her job. For one thing, it does make a difference, though small, and rarely. Second, vicariously, I’d rather know the full depth of the human experience, rather than pretend it’s all roses. It puts a lot of things about humanity in perspective, and not just the hard work that people like my partner do. People always say to her, when they find out what she does, “I could never do that.” And yet she does it. If you’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist, then I’m sure you can find a way to maintain that. After all, unemployment is at 9.5%.

    1. Avoiding pictures of horrible, disgusting things like blood and gore, mutilated bodies, and malformed, dead infants is not the same as pretending that they don’t exist. Your post makes no sense.

      (I was a 911 operator for 16 years, if that matters. We were actually pretty well-paid.)

  25. “I predict that Internet Content Reviewer will become the job synonymous with massive, homicidal mental breakdowns. ”

    So Antinous, how are you doing?

  27. I’ve got a strong stomach (and intellect) and a strong (liberal) guardian streak… where do I sign up?

  28. Any of these companies hiring? I’ve been dead inside for decades, and I could really use a job. It would be nice to put my robot-like lack of compassion to work.

  29. I just spent the day looking a crime scene photographs. I realized I had been at it too long when some of the gore started to be funny. Seeing how often people inflict scenes like that on other people for no reason would be disheartening. All kinds of stuff is out there. Some of it should be shocking. That a job desensitizes a person to it is not a good thing.

  30. Hi, I worked as a ‘content moderator’ for a few years, for a company that ran a bunch of chat/dating/hookup sites. to answer a few questions:

    -The article is a tad exaggerated. Most people who worked there and were weird or depressed were like that to start with, and used the job as an excuse for bringing up weird shit. Of course, discussing weird shit was pretty much part of the job.

    -We never saw a psychiatrist, and I think any attempt to get a company-sponsored one would have involved management laughing in our faces.

    -We were in constant contact with law enforcement. I was a supervisor, and it was part of my job to forward anything that illegal on to the authorities, and help them out when they called us requesting information. I’d spend a good two to four hours each shift removing pedophiles and people who were roleplaying they were 12 years old too convincingly.

    -Although you do have people occasionally uploading seriously illegal material, about 90% of the nudity is always overweight, under-endowed men. It’ll remove any size-related anxiety you have.

  31. Wow. From The Fine Article:

    “The company’s roughly 50 workers view a combined average of 20 million photos a week.”

    Figuring 50 people and a 40 hour workweek, that works out to *averaging* 2.8 photos per second. Fire hose time.

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