[victoriasun]

But are people like that people you want as your co-workers?

Serious question, I don't mean this facetiously. I think is an extremely complex question and I wonder if introducing someone who is openly comfortable with gore is dangerous to the psychological health of the company.

For example, at a previous company a co-worker publicly shared, without a trigger warning and in great detail, a very gorey thing he enjoyed watching to relax. Lots of people were extremely disturbed by this -- not disturbed by him, per se, but disturbed that he shared this without any kind of warning. I don't even resent him despite myself being pretty disturbed because what one considers normal is subjective, and if you regularly relax to this content you probably don't realise that this might not be anyone else's cup of tea. But it really makes me wonder -- what if the guy who sits next to me starts telling me that ISIS beheadings are relaxing to him?

[AdmiralAsshat]

Well, I probably wouldn't invite him to my game night, but if it's his job to watch ISIS videos, it seems like he'd be well-suited, no?

It seems like if you acknowledge that: a) Terrible job exists b) Terrible job is necessary

You should also allow for a person to do terrible job without thinking that they must be a terrible person by extension. Otherwise you continue the well-trodden history of certain professions like hide-makers, executioners, or coroners being ostracized from society for doing the job we told them to do.

[wdgz]

I'm sorry if I implied that I think that people who would enjoy this work are bad people. I certainly don't feel this way; I mean, I myself have worked on a platform that plenty of Nazis use and i don't consider myself a Nazi, so it would be hypocritical of me to say as such.

I agree that I wouldn't personally spend time with said person, but my question was less about personal social responsibilities outside of work. My example I pointed out happened at work, during normal work hours, in a social space where people have inherently less control over who they surround themselves with. This is the part of it all that is fuzzy to me, and I don't have a clear answer for.

[MattGaiser]

Would they need to be co-workers beyond corporate title? Content moderation is sitting at a desk clicking through things for hours a day.

[victoriasun]

Certainly in our own, private social spaces we are free to choose whomever we socialize with, but at work that option is less available. The example I gave happened during work hours over work communication, so there is always going to be social overlap that you can't simply opt out of (the age old 'what is culture fit' question applies here, and every co-worker contributes to company culture in some way).

And while a lot of content moderators do focus purely on clicking thru things, a lot of other ones still regularly interface with the company. I used to work at Discord, where content moderation of this level (and traumatic nature) was a constant concern. As engineers you may be staffed to work on a tool to help with moderation. Or you may be working on some fancy AI to help sort and tag unsafe content. And this is only from the product engineering perspective; content moderators will have to work with customer success to create content policy, or enforce bans for unsavory behavior. So I don't think they really are siloable away from the rest of the company, and I'm not even certain that that is a humane way to treat them.