As most of you know by now, I love articles like this that give a glimpse into a world that isn't usually seen or thought about. I've known about moderation and I've know that content gets removed but I never imagined that there are literally hordes of people in third world counties clicking "delete".

estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

I also love the insights about how Google/Youtube does moderation. I have wondered why some videos that were horribly violent were allowed while others weren't.

For instance, in late 2010, Google’s legal team gave moderators the urgent task of deleting the violent sermons of American radical Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, after a British woman said she was inspired by them to stab a politician.

...

The Arab Spring was in full swing, and activists were using YouTube to show the world the government crackdowns that resulted. Moderators were instructed to leave such “newsworthy” videos up with a warning, even if they violated the content guidelines.

I've spent my fair share of time on the danker parts of the internet. I'm young enough to have spent a lot of my rebellious, curious teenage years with an internet connection. I've become desensitized to some stuff but never to the point that I imagine some people are. Some people seem to get off on the videos or can watch anything without cringing or getting a pit in the bottom of their stomach. Some things immediately trip a switch in me and it's on to happy pictures of kittens and beautiful vaginas or anything to get the images out of my head.

The first gore video I probably saw was the beheading video of the US soldiers in 2006. Whereas my friends watched the news, I watched the news and wanted to see the video. Why didn't they show the video? So I went online and found it and watched it - or about 1/4th of it. Then I took my glasses off and squinted and watched blurry shapes move. I wanted to see it...but I didn't. I've seen or seen enough of just about everything. Shock vids to gore to weird, weird, weird sex. For a while, if I knew it existed, I wanted to see it. I'm one of those people who saw things not because it was an innocuous link, but because someone mentioned that there was a weird site that showed a man with his asshole spread the size of a pizza. >.<

The thing is, I can always escape and whenever I wandered into a thread, I was in and out and done. I sit on the edge of my chair, on the edge of closing the window, with one hand over my eyes, peeking through the crack between my fingers, and the other hand ready to hit [x]. I hit a limit of "alright..what the fuck am I doing here" and return to reality. I can't imagine having a job where everything you do, all day, every day, is watch that shit.

During his eight-hour shifts, Rob sat at a desk in YouTube’s open office with two monitors. On one he flicked through batches of 10 videos at a time. On the other monitor, he could do whatever he wanted. He watched the entire Battlestar Galactica series with one eye while nuking torture videos and hate speech with the other.

Jesus. No wonder they have mental health pros trying to deal with it now. You can't take that kind of shit for too long. The thought that it is a job that people truly want in developing countries is even more terrifying. They don't have the luxury of getting a new job or years of therapy, either. Man.