Most social sites, and some dating sites and apps, use humans in the Philippines to moderate profile content. Over 100,000 people there spend their days looking at the most disturbing things you could imagine, and then some.
Everybody hits the wall, generally between three and five months. You just think, ‘Holy shit, what am I spending my day doing? This is awful.’
“It’s like PTSD…. There is a memory trace in their mind.” Denise and her team set up extensive monitoring systems for their clients. Employees are given a battery of psychological tests to determine their mental baseline, then interviewed and counseled regularly to minimize the effect of disturbing images. But even with the best counseling, staring into the heart of human darkness exacts a toll. Workers quit because they feel desensitized by the hours of pornography they watch each day and no longer want to be intimate with their spouses. Others report a supercharged sex drive. “How would you feel watching pornography for eight hours a day, every day?” Denise says. “How long can you take that?”
I can’t imagine having to look at dating site profiles for eight hours a day, let alone stuff from Whisper and other anonymous apps. Kudos for these people’s efforts to keep our online experience a bit safer and trigger-free.
Read more at WIRED.
