Have you ever wondered how Facebook, with more than 800 million users and billions of updates everyday manage to keep the porn, gore, and hate out of your news feed? An article on Gawker Inside Facebook’s Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where ‘Camel Toes’ are More Offensive Than ‘Crushed Heads’ sheds some light on Facebook’s content moderation. Definitely not how I expected.
Facebook subcontracts its screening to an online outsourcing company name oDesk, that employed rougly 50 people in countries such as Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, India, and Morocco. These moderators checks every piece of flagged content for around $1 an hour, which could go upto $4 with commissions.
Gawker interviewed a number of moderators (both past and current), including a man who only managed to last three weeks.
“Pedophelia, Necrophelia, Beheadings, Suicides, etc … I left [because] I value my mentl sanity,” Gwaker quoted him.
More descriptions of the job by former moderators included:
“Think like that there is a sewer channel, and all the mess/dirt/waste/shit of the world flow towards you, and you have to clean it.
“You had KKK cropping up everywhere.”
“They did mention that the job was not for the light of heart before hiring me,” he added. “I think it’s ultimately my fault for underestimating JUST how disturbing it’d be.”
A 21-year-old Moroccan shared a 17-page manual with Gawker that include a one-page cheat sheet which you can see below.
