18 ms·

The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook

138 points by mef 9y ago

mef 9y ago
non paywall link http://archive.is/tmFps http://archive.is/tmFps
danaan1003 9y ago
I thought the article would be about the gigantic computer scrap-yards in Ghana.
Waterluvian 9y ago
I found this juxtaposition unsettling: “I was watching the content of deranged psychos in the woods somewhere who don’t have a conscience for the texture or feel of human connection,” "...If the managers noticed a few minutes of inactivity, they would ping him on workplace messaging tool Slack to ask why he wasn’t working." The texture of human connection is severely diminished when you are managing what is essentially a drip-fed trauma survivor remotely using a metric of trauma exposure per minute.
- harryf 9y ago
  Likewise this part... > Whisper no longer employs U.S.-based moderators. It uses a team in the Philippines along with machine-learning technology. Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. The underlying issue is seeing content moderation purely as cost that should be minimized. Taking YouTube Kids for example I'm sure you could sell parents products based around moderated content that educates their children, supports their morals and beliefs etc. i.e. find ways to generate enough income with moderated content to treat people fairly.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ascorbic 9y ago
    Toca Boca tried this with their Toca TV service, but it was discontinued because subscription rates were too low. If anyone could do it it should be them, having proven that it is possible to charge for kids' apps with no in app purchases. https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-tv-update/ https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-tv-update/
  - cgmg 9y ago
    > Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. Are you saying such workers are better off without these jobs?
  - oscargrouch 9y ago
    > Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. Other big problem with this is the lack of cultural background for doing this. Only if you belong to a given culture you can understand the subtleties and the cultural tolerance according to each culture. This is one of the things that should make us think, about how bad is the situation of centralized social networks, when the values of one culture can be arbitrarily imposed into another. People and cultures in general should have the right to organize according to their own cultural values. So the only right way to do this, at least if its a centrally managed network, is to have native people doing this for each country they have presence for. If this is too expensive to do it in the beggining .. maybe hire not just cheaper labor, but from countries (cultures) that have good sensibility about foreign cultures, and select the people with talent to understand cultural nuances. I feel particularlt outraged when according to a given foreign culture, one thing that locally is not a big deal, get censured, and then you think how close we are to the big brother (by the way theres a certain country already going through this path). But in the western hemisphere, if nothing change, we are slowly consolidating a regime of digital feudalism were corporations are free to dictate rules for our lives.
mbrumlow 9y ago
This sort of stuff at one point was handled by hosting providers. It now seems that the internet is "facebook/google" so it is no wonder they are getting the brunt of this sot of work. I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out. 8k post in a day is just too many for one person. Its not about how much work they are doing, its about the content they are subjected to look at and review. To do that you have to actually think about it and make a decision -- and that takes a toll on people -- you don't get to forget. I am not one for regulation but if there is on place in tech that should be considered for regulation, then I think this is a good place to start. These workers need paid more, access to therapy and much more time off. I also think there are technical solutions to help ease the work needed, but that cost, and nobody seems to want to pay with human workers left holding the bag. This would also include stricter rules to make filtering easier. Good job, you guys can put a dancing hotdog on the screen why not use that talent to work and make back-end systems to automate this sort of horrid work away. I know it will be hard, but if NN and deep learning is all cracked up to what keeps being preached then it should be within the realm of possible. Also, while with the when it comes to the law, I am for the notion that it is okay if 10 bad people get away if it means not falsely convicting 1 good person. However on the internet with regards to what normally amounts to pointless shit that people post on the internet. I am okay with 100 good post being automatically removed it if means 1 bad post is also removed.
- jstanley 9y ago
  > I am okay with 100 good post being automatically removed it if means 1 bad post is also removed. Why? Posts on the internet are pure data. I'm okay with no posts ever being removed.
  - function_seven 9y ago
    Posts on the Internet may be pure data, but that doesn't give support for why they should never be removed. IRL analogy: the dog shit that my neighbor throws onto the sidewalk is pure matter. Just atoms and molecules and such. Should it not be removed? EDIT: Not that I agree with the 100 sacrificial removals for each good one. I don't. But the "pure data" argument doesn't work for me.
thriftwy 9y ago
Abuse departments make Internets not feel like hpme since maybe 2005. I for once will be happier if they stop doing that.
- victorhooi 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "hpme" - do you mean "home"? If so, I suspect you're just commenting without basis, and have no actual inkling what this content is really like. I work for a large internet company, and have to deal with some of this as a tangential part of my role. Trust me, there is stuff that most normal people would never even want to go near. (No, I'm not talking some angry rants, or some naughty pictures). I'm all for freedom of speech and all - but I have no qualms about this stuff being flagged as inappropriate and put behind a filter. If you really want to find this stuff, you can - there are communities and chat groups trading in it - you wouldn't have much trouble finding it. But I would posit that most people that want this stuff are actively looking for it, versus wanting to see it on their Facebook or Google+ feed.
- origami777 9y ago
  So the bottom of the well can be seen from HN too. I wonder what’s on your hard drive.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  Abuse departments make their respective platforms better places to be, largely because most people do not want to sift through a flood of angry pro-white propaganda and "jailbait". Just look at the horrendous quality of discourse on Voat. Or worse, 8chan.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    So previously you all were talking about filtering child porn, but now you admit the desire to filter out political content you disagree with? That's, like, dramatic reversal.
    - UncleMeat 9y ago
radmarshallb 9y ago
I would expect that social media websites whose content is largely decided democratically (via votes, shares, or the like) would relegate the majority of this content to a place where it is not seen by many. I would argue that the best way to handle this issue is to let the sites mechanisms deal with the content accordingly and then focus efforts on developing processes that will be able to detect and remove it automatically. The article implies that they are forcing moderators to view the content at a high clip. Why, so as to get false positives back online as quickly as possible? Maybe moderators should only review content that reaches a certain threshold of complaint, and other content is left as is?
- legulere 9y ago
  Reddit is such a website and it’s generally consensus there that voting alone does not work.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Subreddits are pretty heavily moderated via the "report" buttons. Moderators are basically whatever community member created the community plus the other volunteer users that they picked, and if you have a problem with a subreddit's moderation the usual response is "It's my sub, you can leave." I'm not sure how that would work for facebook.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Reddit recently deleted a whole bunch of subreddits because they decided that wasn’t good enough. Anecdotally, I know someone who was interested in one of those topics (zoophilia), who thought the subreddit in question was “a dumpster fire” yet was still upset about it being banned.
- empath75 9y ago
  If you have voting and subreddits you’d just end up with a community that only upvotes what they think is the best child porn (ie: Reddit’s jailbait subreddits)
Santosh83 9y ago
Why are we surprised or shocked? Hasn't society always used servants, police, soldiers, miners, loggers, garbage men, wardens, and such to do tasks that the rest of us are loath to do, and to keep certain stuff away from 'civilised' society? Why would online be different suddenly? Analogues of all the above are needed online too. And somebody who has no other option will be unfortunate enough to fill these roles.
- jstanley 9y ago
  > Why would online be different? Because you don't have to look at anything you don't want. Because it's not bounded by physical space limitations, so everyone can have as much "space" as they want. Because you can travel from any point to any other point almost instantaneously. Because you can be in as many different places simultaneously as you have the capacity to keep track of. Because you can come and go as you please without anyone else even knowing. The internet is nothing like the physical world.
- greyman 9y ago
  We are not surprised or shocked. This topic was also reported before, and the article is just about not adequate protections of those workers. Someone must do this work, until AI will be able to filter out everything, but those companies are rich enough to take better care of those workers. That's all.
gonzo41 9y ago
What they don't tell you, you can get PTSD from being a witness to trauma. It happens to cops and lawyers investigating child abuse all the time.
rpmcmurphy 9y ago
The internet really is an incredible cesspool. It would be interesting to see how the public reacted if YouTube and Facebook turned off their content moderation for a week. It would make the goatse meme look like a Sunday school picnic.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Yes, but really, humanity is the incredible cesspool. Facebook is just mirror. The interesting thing is that instead of trying to prosecute the criminals behind this content we would rather just censor it so we can pretend it doesn't exist.
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    I disagree. 99% of us are good people. The cesspool loves a stage/soapbox though.
meritt 9y ago
It's not a popular opinion but remove the anonymity/fake accounts and you eliminate a very significant portion of these issues.
katastic 9y ago
South Park did an episode on this. Where everyone was so afraid of "reality" they elected someone to censor it all and keep their tweets only positive. Butters had to see every depraved thing. And he ended up trying to kill himself. And in the end, when he almost died, they blamed him for failing to be the perfect filter.
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  Great episode http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/videos/a39070/south-park-season-19-episode-5-shaming/ http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/videos/a39070/south-...
jorgec 9y ago
It starts censoring topics that are illegal, then topics that aren't family friendly and finally, it will end censoring point of view and free speech. Its 1984 all over. Im not an anarchist however, if something is illegal then go ahead and cut it but, censoring without a legal cause is a crime.
- guuz 9y ago
  Facebook is a private company and it has the right to regulate speech in its digital properties (at least it seems the case in the US). You also are not bound to it, theoretically, so you can go elsewhere and say what you wanna say. I write theoretically because Facebook is so pervasive where I live that we cannot simply ignore it.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  Social media platforms are owned by privately held companies. Their moderation is up to their discretion. Sure there's a larger conversation about their ubiquity and how social media posts relate to free speech, but as things work now in the US, Facebook isn't breaking any rules by censoring anything for the most part. If you want to collect pictures of horrible crap and start a website, as long as it's not illegal you can host it on your own.
Pica_soO 9y ago
If there ever was a ISIS recruiting pool, this is it.
guuz 9y ago
It's a good space for regulation. The treatment these workers are subjected to is ignominious.
tyingq 9y ago
Can't help but being reminded of this Silicon Valley episode: https://youtu.be/dvn-hpZdElo https://youtu.be/dvn-hpZdElo
aglavine 9y ago
The problem is more the job conditions than the job itself.
mikehines 9y ago
I wonder what AI thinks and then does to us when we have one.
quantummkv 9y ago
The real problem is not that such content exists, the problem is that Facebook makes it horrifically easy to distribute such content. Back when Facebook was more of interacting with people rather that liking and subscribing to whatever these content and joke pages shoved down these concerns where not present much. Clickbait, etc is just a natural progression of like and subscribing culture. My Facebook feed about a year ago, when i last opened facebook was filled with the same memes and "inspirational messages" shoved down by a handful of pages being shared by dumb idiots. I had to search and go directly to a person's profile to see what they were up to. The real problem is that Facebook started behaving like a TV channel that a social network. If Facebook goes to only keeping profiles of real persons and removes any and all of these pages and blogs and news agencies and the lot, a lot of its woes with regard to content will be solved. These pages give a sense of anonymity to the people behind them. Take that anonymity away. Once you know that your personal image will be directly tied to whatever you post and held responsible by everyone in your friend list, you will begin to curb your tendencies in public.
- auxym 9y ago
  I've taken to blocking all those random joke pages on sight.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  I believe that the "one account = one real person" policy actually makes things worse. Regardless of what Zuckerberg claims to believe, in real life I have multiple "profiles". For example, I don't debate Java programming with my family members, I don't debate politics or religion (or generally any opinions, because no one knows what will become a hot political topic tomorrow) with my colleagues, etc. Similarly, I have different rules for reading stuff. I hate memes, but if my cousins post some, I am not going to block them like I would most other people; I will just sigh and scroll down. More importantly, I do not want to read stuff from all my social circles at the same times; sometimes I am in a mood for family stuff, sometimes programming, sometimes other things. Even better would be to have advanced tools (but with simple user interface) to specify what I want to read; e.g. "what my cousin wrote, but not what someone else wrote and my cousin shared"; to filter posts containing certain words, etc. Merely removing anonymity will simply divide users into two groups: those who care about not getting fired tomorrow so they only post completely unobjectionable politically correct vanilla stuff, or those who are not very smart or young and inexperienced or too rich to care about what other people think, so they post anything that comes to their minds.
lyra_comms 9y ago
One of our team members used to do this job; luckily, she managed to do it with deep learning, so didn't have to spend too much time looking at unpleasant images. This experience is one of the main drivers that pushes our team to develop an open, nonprofit conversation platform on which harrassment is difficult by design. www.hellolyra.com/introduction
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
megamindbrian2 9y ago
I want to do this job.
wglb 9y ago
In the very early days of the internet being used at a very large corporation, I had the task of reviewing proxy logs to monitor what was euphemistically called "non-business use of the internet". I started by scanning for URLs with "XXX" in them, then pivoted to make a more extensive list. I never looked at the content itself. Just the seeing the URLs was corrosive enough.
versteegen 9y ago
A Kaggle competition just started a week ago, hosted by Jigsaw (part of Alphabet) for classifying toxic content (insults, threats, vulgarity, etc) in online comments. $35,000 prize pool. https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification-challenge https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification... Also interesting, they already have an API for doing this sort of classification: https://perspectiveapi.com/ https://perspectiveapi.com/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

138 points by mef 9y ago

mef 9y ago

non paywall link http://archive.is/tmFps http://archive.is/tmFps

danaan1003 9y ago

I thought the article would be about the gigantic computer scrap-yards in Ghana.

Waterluvian 9y ago

I found this juxtaposition unsettling: “I was watching the content of deranged psychos in the woods somewhere who don’t have a conscience for the texture or feel of human connection,” "...If the managers noticed a few minutes of inactivity, they would ping him on workplace messaging tool Slack to ask why he wasn’t working." The texture of human connection is severely diminished when you are managing what is essentially a drip-fed trauma survivor remotely using a metric of trauma exposure per minute.

harryf 9y ago
Likewise this part... > Whisper no longer employs U.S.-based moderators. It uses a team in the Philippines along with machine-learning technology. Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. The underlying issue is seeing content moderation purely as cost that should be minimized. Taking YouTube Kids for example I'm sure you could sell parents products based around moderated content that educates their children, supports their morals and beliefs etc. i.e. find ways to generate enough income with moderated content to treat people fairly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ascorbic 9y ago
  Toca Boca tried this with their Toca TV service, but it was discontinued because subscription rates were too low. If anyone could do it it should be them, having proven that it is possible to charge for kids' apps with no in app purchases. https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-tv-update/ https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-tv-update/
- cgmg 9y ago
  > Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. Are you saying such workers are better off without these jobs?
- oscargrouch 9y ago
  > Great that they moved the problem to a place with even fewer protections for workers. Other big problem with this is the lack of cultural background for doing this. Only if you belong to a given culture you can understand the subtleties and the cultural tolerance according to each culture. This is one of the things that should make us think, about how bad is the situation of centralized social networks, when the values of one culture can be arbitrarily imposed into another. People and cultures in general should have the right to organize according to their own cultural values. So the only right way to do this, at least if its a centrally managed network, is to have native people doing this for each country they have presence for. If this is too expensive to do it in the beggining .. maybe hire not just cheaper labor, but from countries (cultures) that have good sensibility about foreign cultures, and select the people with talent to understand cultural nuances. I feel particularlt outraged when according to a given foreign culture, one thing that locally is not a big deal, get censured, and then you think how close we are to the big brother (by the way theres a certain country already going through this path). But in the western hemisphere, if nothing change, we are slowly consolidating a regime of digital feudalism were corporations are free to dictate rules for our lives.

mbrumlow 9y ago

This sort of stuff at one point was handled by hosting providers. It now seems that the internet is "facebook/google" so it is no wonder they are getting the brunt of this sot of work. I can tell you back in the day when I worked for Rackshack I never envied the abuse department. They always looked stressed out. 8k post in a day is just too many for one person. Its not about how much work they are doing, its about the content they are subjected to look at and review. To do that you have to actually think about it and make a decision -- and that takes a toll on people -- you don't get to forget. I am not one for regulation but if there is on place in tech that should be considered for regulation, then I think this is a good place to start. These workers need paid more, access to therapy and much more time off. I also think there are technical solutions to help ease the work needed, but that cost, and nobody seems to want to pay with human workers left holding the bag. This would also include stricter rules to make filtering easier. Good job, you guys can put a dancing hotdog on the screen why not use that talent to work and make back-end systems to automate this sort of horrid work away. I know it will be hard, but if NN and deep learning is all cracked up to what keeps being preached then it should be within the realm of possible. Also, while with the when it comes to the law, I am for the notion that it is okay if 10 bad people get away if it means not falsely convicting 1 good person. However on the internet with regards to what normally amounts to pointless shit that people post on the internet. I am okay with 100 good post being automatically removed it if means 1 bad post is also removed.

jstanley 9y ago
> I am okay with 100 good post being automatically removed it if means 1 bad post is also removed. Why? Posts on the internet are pure data. I'm okay with no posts ever being removed.
- function_seven 9y ago
  Posts on the Internet may be pure data, but that doesn't give support for why they should never be removed. IRL analogy: the dog shit that my neighbor throws onto the sidewalk is pure matter. Just atoms and molecules and such. Should it not be removed? EDIT: Not that I agree with the 100 sacrificial removals for each good one. I don't. But the "pure data" argument doesn't work for me.

thriftwy 9y ago

Abuse departments make Internets not feel like hpme since maybe 2005. I for once will be happier if they stop doing that.

victorhooi 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "hpme" - do you mean "home"? If so, I suspect you're just commenting without basis, and have no actual inkling what this content is really like. I work for a large internet company, and have to deal with some of this as a tangential part of my role. Trust me, there is stuff that most normal people would never even want to go near. (No, I'm not talking some angry rants, or some naughty pictures). I'm all for freedom of speech and all - but I have no qualms about this stuff being flagged as inappropriate and put behind a filter. If you really want to find this stuff, you can - there are communities and chat groups trading in it - you wouldn't have much trouble finding it. But I would posit that most people that want this stuff are actively looking for it, versus wanting to see it on their Facebook or Google+ feed.
origami777 9y ago
So the bottom of the well can be seen from HN too. I wonder what’s on your hard drive.
ashleyn 9y ago
Abuse departments make their respective platforms better places to be, largely because most people do not want to sift through a flood of angry pro-white propaganda and "jailbait". Just look at the horrendous quality of discourse on Voat. Or worse, 8chan.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  So previously you all were talking about filtering child porn, but now you admit the desire to filter out political content you disagree with? That's, like, dramatic reversal.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago

radmarshallb 9y ago

I would expect that social media websites whose content is largely decided democratically (via votes, shares, or the like) would relegate the majority of this content to a place where it is not seen by many. I would argue that the best way to handle this issue is to let the sites mechanisms deal with the content accordingly and then focus efforts on developing processes that will be able to detect and remove it automatically. The article implies that they are forcing moderators to view the content at a high clip. Why, so as to get false positives back online as quickly as possible? Maybe moderators should only review content that reaches a certain threshold of complaint, and other content is left as is?

legulere 9y ago
Reddit is such a website and it’s generally consensus there that voting alone does not work.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Subreddits are pretty heavily moderated via the "report" buttons. Moderators are basically whatever community member created the community plus the other volunteer users that they picked, and if you have a problem with a subreddit's moderation the usual response is "It's my sub, you can leave." I'm not sure how that would work for facebook.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Reddit recently deleted a whole bunch of subreddits because they decided that wasn’t good enough. Anecdotally, I know someone who was interested in one of those topics (zoophilia), who thought the subreddit in question was “a dumpster fire” yet was still upset about it being banned.
empath75 9y ago
If you have voting and subreddits you’d just end up with a community that only upvotes what they think is the best child porn (ie: Reddit’s jailbait subreddits)

Santosh83 9y ago

Why are we surprised or shocked? Hasn't society always used servants, police, soldiers, miners, loggers, garbage men, wardens, and such to do tasks that the rest of us are loath to do, and to keep certain stuff away from 'civilised' society? Why would online be different suddenly? Analogues of all the above are needed online too. And somebody who has no other option will be unfortunate enough to fill these roles.

jstanley 9y ago
> Why would online be different? Because you don't have to look at anything you don't want. Because it's not bounded by physical space limitations, so everyone can have as much "space" as they want. Because you can travel from any point to any other point almost instantaneously. Because you can be in as many different places simultaneously as you have the capacity to keep track of. Because you can come and go as you please without anyone else even knowing. The internet is nothing like the physical world.
greyman 9y ago
We are not surprised or shocked. This topic was also reported before, and the article is just about not adequate protections of those workers. Someone must do this work, until AI will be able to filter out everything, but those companies are rich enough to take better care of those workers. That's all.

gonzo41 9y ago

What they don't tell you, you can get PTSD from being a witness to trauma. It happens to cops and lawyers investigating child abuse all the time.

rpmcmurphy 9y ago

The internet really is an incredible cesspool. It would be interesting to see how the public reacted if YouTube and Facebook turned off their content moderation for a week. It would make the goatse meme look like a Sunday school picnic.

saas_co_de 9y ago
Yes, but really, humanity is the incredible cesspool. Facebook is just mirror. The interesting thing is that instead of trying to prosecute the criminals behind this content we would rather just censor it so we can pretend it doesn't exist.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  I disagree. 99% of us are good people. The cesspool loves a stage/soapbox though.

meritt 9y ago

It's not a popular opinion but remove the anonymity/fake accounts and you eliminate a very significant portion of these issues.

katastic 9y ago

South Park did an episode on this. Where everyone was so afraid of "reality" they elected someone to censor it all and keep their tweets only positive. Butters had to see every depraved thing. And he ended up trying to kill himself. And in the end, when he almost died, they blamed him for failing to be the perfect filter.

creaghpatr 9y ago
Great episode http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/videos/a39070/south-park-season-19-episode-5-shaming/ http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/videos/a39070/south-...

jorgec 9y ago

It starts censoring topics that are illegal, then topics that aren't family friendly and finally, it will end censoring point of view and free speech. Its 1984 all over. Im not an anarchist however, if something is illegal then go ahead and cut it but, censoring without a legal cause is a crime.

guuz 9y ago
Facebook is a private company and it has the right to regulate speech in its digital properties (at least it seems the case in the US). You also are not bound to it, theoretically, so you can go elsewhere and say what you wanna say. I write theoretically because Facebook is so pervasive where I live that we cannot simply ignore it.
stuntkite 9y ago
Social media platforms are owned by privately held companies. Their moderation is up to their discretion. Sure there's a larger conversation about their ubiquity and how social media posts relate to free speech, but as things work now in the US, Facebook isn't breaking any rules by censoring anything for the most part. If you want to collect pictures of horrible crap and start a website, as long as it's not illegal you can host it on your own.

Pica_soO 9y ago

If there ever was a ISIS recruiting pool, this is it.

guuz 9y ago

It's a good space for regulation. The treatment these workers are subjected to is ignominious.

tyingq 9y ago

Can't help but being reminded of this Silicon Valley episode: https://youtu.be/dvn-hpZdElo https://youtu.be/dvn-hpZdElo

aglavine 9y ago

The problem is more the job conditions than the job itself.

mikehines 9y ago

I wonder what AI thinks and then does to us when we have one.

quantummkv 9y ago

The real problem is not that such content exists, the problem is that Facebook makes it horrifically easy to distribute such content. Back when Facebook was more of interacting with people rather that liking and subscribing to whatever these content and joke pages shoved down these concerns where not present much. Clickbait, etc is just a natural progression of like and subscribing culture. My Facebook feed about a year ago, when i last opened facebook was filled with the same memes and "inspirational messages" shoved down by a handful of pages being shared by dumb idiots. I had to search and go directly to a person's profile to see what they were up to. The real problem is that Facebook started behaving like a TV channel that a social network. If Facebook goes to only keeping profiles of real persons and removes any and all of these pages and blogs and news agencies and the lot, a lot of its woes with regard to content will be solved. These pages give a sense of anonymity to the people behind them. Take that anonymity away. Once you know that your personal image will be directly tied to whatever you post and held responsible by everyone in your friend list, you will begin to curb your tendencies in public.

auxym 9y ago
I've taken to blocking all those random joke pages on sight.
Viliam1234 9y ago
I believe that the "one account = one real person" policy actually makes things worse. Regardless of what Zuckerberg claims to believe, in real life I have multiple "profiles". For example, I don't debate Java programming with my family members, I don't debate politics or religion (or generally any opinions, because no one knows what will become a hot political topic tomorrow) with my colleagues, etc. Similarly, I have different rules for reading stuff. I hate memes, but if my cousins post some, I am not going to block them like I would most other people; I will just sigh and scroll down. More importantly, I do not want to read stuff from all my social circles at the same times; sometimes I am in a mood for family stuff, sometimes programming, sometimes other things. Even better would be to have advanced tools (but with simple user interface) to specify what I want to read; e.g. "what my cousin wrote, but not what someone else wrote and my cousin shared"; to filter posts containing certain words, etc. Merely removing anonymity will simply divide users into two groups: those who care about not getting fired tomorrow so they only post completely unobjectionable politically correct vanilla stuff, or those who are not very smart or young and inexperienced or too rich to care about what other people think, so they post anything that comes to their minds.

lyra_comms 9y ago

One of our team members used to do this job; luckily, she managed to do it with deep learning, so didn't have to spend too much time looking at unpleasant images. This experience is one of the main drivers that pushes our team to develop an open, nonprofit conversation platform on which harrassment is difficult by design. www.hellolyra.com/introduction

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

megamindbrian2 9y ago

I want to do this job.

wglb 9y ago

In the very early days of the internet being used at a very large corporation, I had the task of reviewing proxy logs to monitor what was euphemistically called "non-business use of the internet". I started by scanning for URLs with "XXX" in them, then pivoted to make a more extensive list. I never looked at the content itself. Just the seeing the URLs was corrosive enough.

versteegen 9y ago

A Kaggle competition just started a week ago, hosted by Jigsaw (part of Alphabet) for classifying toxic content (insults, threats, vulgarity, etc) in online comments. $35,000 prize pool. https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification-challenge https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification... Also interesting, they already have an API for doing this sort of classification: https://perspectiveapi.com/ https://perspectiveapi.com/

deleted 9y ago

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