In the Filipino town of Bacoor, people are paid incredibly low wages to watch violent, sexual and all-round inappropriate images and videos all day in order to keep them from popping up on your Facebook feed. And yes, it's as grim as it sounds.
Wired ran a featurereporting on the cramped offices of the content moderator - interviewing a 21 year old called Baybayan who is employed as one of many to sort the Grandma Problem. Which is the fact that, now grandma's are logging on to social media sites to connect with their grandchildren, they won't come back if they see anything violent or disturbing, so someone's got to put in the hours to make sure that doesn't happen. Also, let's be honest, it's for the majority of us normal Facebookers too - who wants to see a two pronged dildo in a vagina when they check their News feed in the morning? Not Baybayan, but that's exactly what he has to do. Along with hundreds of thousands of others.
A young woman called Maria finds the constant onslaught of disturbing material difficult to deal with. 'There’s this lady,” she told journalist Adrian Chen. 'Probably in the age of 15 to 18, I don’t know. She looks like a minor. There’s this bald guy putting his head to the lady’s vagina. The lady is blindfolded, handcuffed, screaming and crying.'
It's bestiality that she finds particular hard, too. 'I get really affected by bestiality with children, I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.'
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A guy moderating for YouTube, Rob Cadeno, found that watching such images all day really took its toll on his emotional (and physical) wellbeing. 'If someone was uploading animal abuse, a lot of the time it was the person who did it. He was proud of that,' he says. 'And seeing it from the eyes of someone who was proud to do the fucked-up thing, rather than news reporting on the fucked-up thing—it just hurts you so much harder, for some reason. It just gives you a much darker view of humanity.' He started drinking, gained weight and became withdrawn and testy.
Others report a lack of libido, and being unable to connect sexually with their wives or husbands - desensitized to hours of hardcore, violent pornography. They also, understandably, find it difficult to trust other people, knowing the full extent of the dark side of the human race.
Jane Stevenson, who set up Workplace Wellbeing after being involved in the first wave of anti-child pornography investigations in the UK (and seeing what looking at those images every day did to fellow investigators) is adamant that it's incredibly damaging. 'There’s the thought that it’s just the same as bereavement, or bullying at work, and the same people can deal with it,' she says. 'All of us will go through a bereavement, almost all of us will be distressed by somebody saying something we don’t like. All of these things are normal things. But is having sex with a 2-year-old normal? Is cutting somebody’s head off—quite slowly, mind you; I don’t mean to traumatize you but beheadings don’t happen quickly—is that normal behavior? Is that something you expect?'
Astoundingly, Wired found that, according to the head of SS Blue (an online safety consultancy), there are upwards of 100,000 content moderators the world over, doing this job. Which is twice the total workforce of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook. Oh, and did we mention that they're paid next to nothing?
One guy says he earned $500 a month, another claims to have been offered just $312 to work for Facebook. Which is, in case you needed reminding, is worth $200 billion, at last count.
And you thought your below-minimum-wage waitressing job was awful.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.