The article “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed” was written by Adrian Chen and published on wired.com in October of 2014. This piece was written with the intended audience of any person that uses the internet on a regular basis with the intended purpose of making them think about the amount of effort that is put into filtering what they see on social media sites on a daily basis. A lot of the work that is completed by these people goes entirely unnoticed as not only are the results difficult to visualize, but it is also generally completed in another country entirely.
The main idea of this text is that the labor that is done by large tech companies is not necessarily completed in the well publicized great conditions of the headquarters of these companies in silicon valley, but rather for very poor pay with tremendous adverse side effects. Much of this filtering labor is completed in the Philippines as they have a culture that is very similar to the culture of the US due to the fact that they used to be a colony of the US. These laborers are very poorly compensated and work under terrible conditions. However, sometimes this filtering process takes place on American soil in the nice offices that people generally hear about. There are still terrible side effects. The psychological effects of looking at such dark imagery for such extended periods of time are not exactly known and vary from person to person, but can be similar to PTSD in there severity.
Something that I enjoyed from this article was how they included information about the terrible physical conditions of workers in other countries as well as information about the terrible mental conditions of workers in the US that have desirable physical conditions. The reason that I enjoyed this was because it made me think of my own experience using social media. Around two years ago I noticed a severe increase in the amount of gore and pornography that appeared on my Facebook feed whether it was due to somebody being hacked and accidentally sharing said videos or others actually sharing them. Then after a few months there was almost a complete disappearance of these severe videos. After reading this article it made sense to me as I began to realize and appreciate the effort that had gone into completing such a tremendous task. In the past I had simply assumed either people had stopped posting them or a computer was going through posts and automatically tagging and deleting sensitive posts.
One question that I am left with after reading this article is how can we find a way to filter this dark imagery without subjecting the human mind to what basically qualifies as mental torture?
Sorry I’m so late commenting on this!
I found it interesting that you were able to pinpoint the moment when moderation went into action on social media. I wonder whether that really was what you experienced, or whether moderation had been around before but that was a time when the process became more streamlined or something else happened.
Your last question raises another question for me – can we find ways to respond to the dark imagery without having to just filter it out? Which is another way of asking why it gets posted in the first place, and what kind of world we would have to live in where people would not be compelled to subject one another to that kind of thing…