The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed - Response

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed - Adrian Chen

Area 1:

   In her article The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed, Adrian Chen recounts the experiences of those who work in the field of content moderation for social media websites. In order to maintain the mainstream appeal and customer base of their social media services, companies are now required to hire workers to manually review content for their platform. In an effort to reduce costs in this process, the majority of this work is increasingly being outsourced to the Philippines; not only is it cheaper to hire someone there, but a vast amount of this work is also being done in the Philippines because they have close cultural ties to the United States and their ideas of what might be offensive. Often, the constant exposure to the explicit material associated with these jobs can result in struggles with mental health and symptoms similar to those of PTSD.

     

Area 2:

   What initially stood out to me in this article was the idea of thought as opposed to solicitation. This is a principle brought up by the content moderator Michael Baybayan as it related to a specific post he eventually deemed inappropriate. I found this interesting because it seems like such a crucial human element in the process of deciding what should be censored or not. In an ever-growing technological world in which processes are becoming more automated, the distinction between these two intentions seems like something only a real person could evaluate. Other sites that have employed automated moderation techniques to varying success like YouTube seem to run into problems when they don't take this into account. For instance, what's the difference between advocating something or simply presenting it as a fact or idea? Can a computer make that call?