Chances are, you’ve never accidentally scrolled past child porn on your Facebook or Twitter feed, or cued up an innocuous-looking YouTube video only to find a clip of a beheading. For that, you have tens of thousands of poorly-paid contract workers to thank.

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED

Inside the soul-crushing world of content moderation, where low-wage laborers soak up the worst of…

Read on wired.​com

Reporting for Wired, former Gawker writer Adrian Chen traveled to the Philippines to witness the “content moderation” team of secret-sharing social network Whisper in action. The moderators he met are outsourced, working for a U.S.-based company called TaskUs, and, based on reports of wages for similar jobs, they likely earn a few hundred dollars a month to police the network for dicks, sex solicitation, racism, and gore.

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.

Whisper isn’t the only company that employs moderators—according to Hemanshu Nigam of the online security firm SSP Blue, there are likely “well over 100,000” people working similar jobs, many of whom are based in the Philippines, where companies can pay lower wages than they would in the U.S.

The images and videos moderators are required to view range from relatively banal to unbelievably gruesome. One woman told Chen she didn’t think she’d ever be able to forget a video of what appeared to be child rape that she witnessed early in her career, and a man who worked as a moderator for YouTube in San Francisco said he became overweight and started drinking heavily to cope with the stress of watching decapitation and animal torture at his desk.

The YouTube moderator was one of the lucky ones: Working in the U.S., he made $20 per hour for his troubles. A Filipino man, on the other hand, told Chen he’d recently been offered a job with a firm contracted by Facebook that would pay $312 per month. Assuming a 40-hour work-week, that’s less than $2 an hour.

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Story: http://gawker.com/an-army-of-low-wage-workers-keeps-child-porn-off-your-f-1649835477