Adrian Chen, in Wired, on “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed“:
… Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user-generated content—to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked.
So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook…
Watching Baybayan’s work makes terrifyingly clear the amount of labor that goes into keeping Whisper’s toothpaste in the tube… He begins with a grid of posts, each of which is a rectangular photo, many with bold text overlays—the same rough format as old-school Internet memes. In its freewheeling anonymity, Whisper functions for its users as a sort of externalized id, an outlet for confessions, rants, and secret desires that might be too sensitive (or too boring) for Facebook or Twitter. Moderators here view a raw feed of Whisper posts in real time. Shorn from context, the posts read like the collected tics of a Tourette’s sufferer…
A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism. When Baybayan sees a potential violation, he drills in on it to confirm, then sends it away—erasing it from the user’s account and the service altogether—and moves back to the grid. Within 25 minutes, Baybayan has eliminated an impressive variety of dick pics, thong shots, exotic objects inserted into bodies, hateful taunts, and requests for oral sex.
“What is the intention?” Baybayan says. “You have to determine the difference between thought and solicitation.” He has only a few seconds to decide. New posts are appearing constantly at the top of the screen, pushing the others down. He judges the post to be sexual solicitation and deletes it; somewhere, a horny teen’s hopes are dashed. Baybayan scrolls back to the top of the screen and begins scanning again…
While a large amount of content moderation takes place overseas, much is still done in the US, often by young college graduates like Swearingen was. Many companies employ a two-tiered moderation system, where the most basic moderation is outsourced abroad while more complex screening, which requires greater cultural familiarity, is done domestically. US-based moderators are much better compensated than their overseas counterparts: A brand-new American moderator for a large tech company in the US can make more in an hour than a veteran Filipino moderator makes in a day. But then a career in the outsourcing industry is something many young Filipinos aspire to, whereas American moderators often fall into the job as a last resort, and burnout is common…
raven
Cole should hire some of these guys to make the nannies happy.
WereBear
I can see the burnout potential.
shelley
Top NewsMax headline:
Illegal Voting by Non-Citizens Threatens Midterms Outcome
******************
So I thought the MSM meme is the 2014 Republican sweep. Are they already lining up their excuses in case they lose?
Keith G
@shelley: 1) NewMax is not MSM. 2) It is becoming quite doubtful that that side of the isle will need to be trafficking in excuses.
beth
@shelley: Just keeping the base stoked up. All this talk of a Republican sweep might backfire, with people thinking they don’t really have to vote. This gives them an enemy to vote against.
sharl
This was an excellent article by Adrian Chen. And it gave rise to some interesting follow-up exchanges on Twitter, e.g., the back-and-forth here, first being a pull-quote from a Filipino on Facebook:
Chen also linked to the website of Sarah T. Roberts (@ubiquity75) who has been studying this issue for a few years.
This is very much related to the topic of just how critical ‘illegal aliens’ are to the day-to-day functioning of our “free-market” (hah-hah!) economy. In the earliest days of this current stretch of immigrant bashing, I remember conservative pro-business pundits who, upon being (rarely) asked “why don’t we legally sanction the people hiring these folks, rather than going to ridiculous (and often futile) efforts to keep the immigrants out,” would look totally taken aback by the question. Lying, or truly clueless? Hard to say!
Baud
@efgoldman:
I thought your comment was going to then talk about what this post gave you a craving for.
Good work keeping it classy.
Cervantes
@efgoldman:
Charlie’s Deli in Sharon, open Sunday for breakfast and lunch.
Villago Delenda Est
@shelley: Translation:
“If the Rethuglicans lose, it’s voter fraud. If the Rethuglicans win, the vote is true.”
Every time these assholes scream about “illegals voting” it’s based on utter fantasy that makes Game of Thrones look like understated history.
Baud
@efgoldman:
Makes me shudder.
Cervantes
@efgoldman: There’s a kosher deli in the Student Center at Brandeis in Waltham. I think it’s open on Sunday.
pseudonymous in nc
PTSD counselling for content moderators. Sometimes I wish the worst commenters on the worst websites could spend a day doing content moderation, ideally from their political allies.
(Filipinos also do the grunt work on the cruise ships that allow Americans cheap holidays with free buffets. Very weird national hierarchy on those ships.)
polyorchnid octopunch
@efgoldman: I do similar work, but in email, so there’s a lot more fraud and a lot less porn… but I can tell you that I have seen some terrible things.
Arclite
Wow, with a college degree you can earn $300 a week to filter d!ck pics and beheadings. That’s depressing.
This article is fascinating. I always wondered how the content got filtered, I just assumed algorithms detecting certain color shades, shapes, etc. Didn’t realize so much of it was manual. 100,000 people doing this work? That boggles the mind. I intentionally avoid disturbing images, I can’t imagine doing it as a job. You’d get PTSD. Sounds like the one guy did.