The brave men and women who get paid to clean up the Internet.
On the Internet, where the freedom of information allows compelling stories to escape even the most repressive of governments, censorship is not the first thing that comes to mind. But if it weren’t for battalions of Internet reviewers, all sorts of graphic and detestable material (animal abuse, particularly twisted pornography) would get through to unsuspecting eyes.
Brad Stone writes for the New York Times about a special subculture of people dedicated to dredging up the worst of the worst from the Internet so that they can shield us from seeing it. With more user-submitted content than ever—think sites like Facebook—the opportunities for people to post asinine and illegal things have skyrocketed, and that requires a careful winnowing of uploaded material.
But the winnowing job comes with mental health consequences. “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,” Hemanshu Nigam told The Times. Nigam is an ex-employee at MySpace who used to work in security. “They have no idea that some of the despicable and illegal images they will see can haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
Now, a government task force is looking into the matter, and it has provided a battery of recommendations to the White House. One psychologist, Patricia M. Laperal, created a way to screen potential content moderators for a company in the Philppines. She told The Times that moderators often became depressed and angry and had trouble forming relationships. Many also lost their sexual drive.
Someone’s got to do it, but at what cost? After all, “If you work with garbage, you will get dirty.”
—Seth Putnam
