Policing the web’s lurid precincts
Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harboured on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography.
One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.
An Internet content reviewer, Bess sifts through photographs that people upload to a big social networking site and keeps the illicit material — and there is plenty of it — from being posted. His is an obscure job that is repeated thousands of times over, from office parks in suburban Florida to outsourcing hubs like the Philippines.
With the rise of websites built around material submitted by users, screeners have never been in greater demand. Some Internet firms have tried to get by with software that scans photos for, say, a large area of flesh tones, but nothing is a substitute for a discerning human eye.
The surge in Internet screening services has brought a growing awareness that the jobs can have mental health consequences for the reviewers, some of whom are drawn to the low-paying work by the simple prospect of making money while looking at pornography.
Last month, an industry group established by Congress recommended that the federal government provide financial incentives for companies to “address the psychological impact on employees of exposure to these disturbing images.” Nigam, co-chairman of the group, the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, said global outsourcing firms that moderate content for many large Internet companies do not offer therapeutic care to their workers.
A common strategy at websites is to have users flag questionable content, then hand off material that needs further human review to outsourcing companies that can do so at low cost.
Global outsourcing firms like Infosys Technologies, based in Bangalore, India, and Sykes Enterprises, based in Tampa, Fla., have leapt to offer such services.
Internet companies are reluctant to discuss the particulars of content moderation, since they would rather not draw attention to the unpleasantness that their sites can attract.
But people in the outsourcing industry say tech giants like Microsoft, Yahoo and MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, all outsource some amount of content review.
YouTube, a division of Google, is an exception. If a user indicates a video is inappropriate, software scans the image looking for warning signs of clips that are breaking the site’s rules or the law. Flagged videos are then sent for manual review by YouTube-employed content moderators who, because of the nature of the work, are given only yearlong contracts and access to counseling services.
For its part, Facebook has relied on its users to flag things like pornography or harassing messages. That material is reviewed by Facebook employees in Palo Alto, Calif., and in Dublin.
