How Facebook keeps the porn, gore, and hate out of your Newsfeed

from MSNBC Technolog:

“Pedophilia, Necrophilia. Beheadings, Suicides, etc.”

Those are some examples of what Facebook’s outsourced content monitors must endure while filtering the Internet viscera, according to one who spoke to Gawker’s Adrian Chen.  Animal abuse, “bad fights, a man beating another,” and “KKK cropping up everywhere,” were other examples provided by employees of oDesk, a California-based content-moderation service staffed by employees in India, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey who look at Facebook content.

The Internet can be a dark and horrible place, on this we should all agree. Despite the short-lived exceptions, such as the coordinated spam attack that littered Facebook with porn and gore in November, the social network remains a comparatively clean, well-lighted place. Thanks to a few disgruntled and/or traumatized content monitors in those countries, we now get a peek at how Facebook protects us, and more importantly, itself.

For every photo of a breast-feeding mother or nude drawing clumsily removed from Facebook, content monitors slog through overwhelming evidence of humanity at low tide. For the dirty job of censoring content on the social network that just filed a $100 billion IPO, at least one former oDesk employee told Chen he earned $1 an hour. Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, vented to Chen about the oDesk job he describes as humiliating exploitation of workers, and let loose some long-held mysteries on the why and the how of Facebook’s censoring process.

Derkaoui shared a one-page cheat sheet for moderators with categories such as “Sex and Nudity,” “Hate Content,” “Graphic Content” and “Bullying and Harassment.”

Read the entire article.

via futurejournalismproject