[stickfigure]

You know who else has to deal with these images - and much worse, real-world living cases? Law enforcement. Lawyers. Juries.

Do we just sit back and say "let's stop subjecting those poor officers from having to see evil things"? Of course not. We hire people with strong stomachs and a strong sense of duty. Not everyone who sees this stuff is scarred for life.

See also: Soldiers. Firefighters. Emergency medical workers.

Personally, I'd rather moderate gross things than, say, work in a coal mine. But that's me. I don't appreciate the insinuation that this makes me some sort of monster.

[q3k]

> We hire people with strong stomachs and a strong sense of duty.

It's difficult to have a strong sense of duty for the megacorp that doesn't even bother to employ you directly, but pays another megacorp which then pays you peanuts. When you don't even get to have the context of what you're doing, don't get to follow up on whether what you did was meaningful, whether the perp was caught and tried, whether the child was saved.

It's difficult to have a strong stomach if you don't see this as an occiasional element of your generally tame and meaningful work, but see hours upon hours, days upon days of some of the worst shit that the human race is capable of.

[stephenhuey]

Good point. If someone joins the Marines, they are not paid much but I assume they have a sense of pride in being a Marine. Contractors working for the military are not officially employed and often they're put to work on projects we do not want our military employees doing, but they do it for much higher pay. Law enforcement officials generally have a similar level of pride in their service and are recognized with a badge, uniform, respect, etc. If the contractors that Facebook is putting to work on content moderation don't really get to be part of the Facebook employee roster but are having to do difficult work on par with what many law enforcement personnel have to handle, should they perhaps be compensated far more than Facebook employees just like how a black ops contractor is paid far more than a uniformed Marine? If that's too expensive for Facebook, then perhaps Facebook is not running a profitable business and we should just let it fail.

[kodah]

> If someone joins the Marines, they are not paid much but I assume they have a sense of pride in being a Marine. Contractors working for the military are not officially employed and often they're put to work on projects we do not want our military employees doing, but they do it for much higher pay.

I know this isn't what you're doing, but this sentiment does come awful close to, "they know what they signed up for" logic. Most Marines know before they sign up that they are signing up for a high risk job, mentally and physically. In bootcamp you go through fairly extreme (to an every day person) conditioning and you are regularly conditioned to stress throughout your tenure. It takes an insane amount of work to make a person disregard concern for their own safety and run towards the sound of gun fire. Even then, this conditioning is problematic when people get out, due to numerous reasons, which is why (imo) you see so much disarray in veteran communities. Conditioning people to be to handle extraordinary circumstances is necessary, imo, but you have to find a way to decondition them.

[ceejayoz]

"We hire people with strong stomachs and a strong sense of duty. Not everyone who sees this stuff is scarred for life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

> Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general.

[baumy]

Those studies have been thoroughly discredited. Not only do they qualify things like "shouting" and "loss of temper" as domestic violence (which of course do not meet the legal threshold for that term), they have never been able to be reproduced. When the same exact researchers attempted to reproduce, they got a wildly different rate of 24% using the exact same methodology. Other researchers using better methodology and appropriate definitions of "domestic violence" have found numbers generally between 7% and 11%.

The 40% study itself even says that the victims reported a 10% rate of physical domestic violence from their partner, but specifically does not indicate who the aggressor is - the officer or their spouse. The study is also 30+ years old at this point. [0]

More recent research from 2009, which imo has a far superior methodology and a larger sample size, says that "over 87 percent of officers reported never having engaged in physical domestic violence in their lifetime" [1]

Other studies [2] [3] report rates between about 2% and 11% for mixtures of one time and recurring domestic violence, which are in line with population averages.

[0] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951003089863c

[1] http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1862

[2] http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/index.c...

[3] https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

[ceejayoz]

> More recent research from 2009, which imo has a far superior methodology and a larger sample size, says that "over 87 percent of officers reported never having engaged in physical domestic violence in their lifetime" [1]

I'm sorry, are we reading the same thing?

"Using a survey created from existing scales, 250 officers were contacted within several departments in Central Florida, of these, 90 officers responded."

Asking cops "do you do crimes" is an interesting methodology, for sure.

[baumy]

> Asking cops "do you do crimes" is an interesting methodology, for sure.

How do you think the population wide numbers are gathered?

The core point is that the 40% number is exaggerated BS, if for no other reason than it literally counts "shouting" and "loss of temper". There's no reliable evidence indicating the number for police officers is any different than the general population.

[ceejayoz]

> How do you think the population wide numbers are gathered?

Not merely by asking the perpetrators.

13% of active cops admitting in a survey to domestic violence certainly means the actual number is higher than that.

[nieve]

> More recent research from 2009, which imo has a far superior methodology and a larger sample size, says that "over 87 percent of officers reported never having engaged in physical domestic violence in their lifetime"

Which means 12-13% _admitted_ committing physical domestic violence, what has to be a significant undercount.

[FireBeyond]

> See also: Soldiers. Firefighters. Emergency medical workers.

As a firefighter and paramedic, I wouldn't even begin to compare my job, even dealing with the occasional horrible things, in the real world, with a job that consisted of hours on end of viewing things that would have been deleted from rotten.com for being too problematic, and the effects that that would have on my mental health.

[intended]

I mean, content moderation would be comparable after it had 500 years to evolve human centric best practices.

Even police forces have developed unions and employee care and training practices to keep them sane and healthy.

In contrast, for CM you have the magic of the market outsourcing the work to replaceable humans.

To be honest this assertion of “strong stomachs” is a unsubstantiated and unhealthy fantasy of how people in stressful jobs handle that stress.

[nickthemagicman]

What 'best practices' developed over 500 years are you referring?

I have numerous friends who are police.

They had three months training, then were sent out to see the worst humanity has to offer.

One of my police friends has a coffee table book of interesting dead bodies from crime scenes.

I'm not sure what 500 years of best practice you're referring.

[intended]

From crime scene handling, to forensics, to specialists like SWAT, all the way to non gun carrying police (uk/colonies) vs America’s gun carrying cops to access to medical and mental care and even labor unions, these are modern inventions.

Compare to things like Spanish brotherhoods or the military handling policing in Rome.

[nickthemagicman]

It's a stretch

[cgriswald]

Even someone on a child porn task force won’t be looking at these images in equivalent quantity, frequency, or duration of a content moderator. Many of the things this former content moderator is suggesting are already available to the groups you mention and many people, myself included, don’t think we take good enough care of those groups. It’s also important to mention that stopping child porn is a more important goal by any sane metric than removing child porn from a website so the website can make money tracking people for advertising dollars.

[AdrianB1]

You need to have the stomach to do some jobs. I remember the time when many of my friends in the medical school asked me to go with them to the dissection lab in the first year of college; I was doing CS at that time, but the professors did not know the students yet, so they gave me a lab coat and went with the group. 10 minutes later, a few students fainted, some were puking in the corners, the professor asked me to put the liver in the body on the table because I looked the least affected. I did it, so he asked me for the name to give one extra point at the exam for the semester (I gave a friend's name that was puking).

Most of these people grew up in cities, I grew up in the country side cutting chicken or pigs for food; this makes you less sensitive to some extent.

My friends that are now MDs told me that year was the worst experience of their lives. Being a Facebook moderator can be worse than that, so it can be really bad for some of the people doing this job.

[type0]

> My friends that are now MDs told me that year was the worst experience of their lives.

This is just incredibly telling how shielded these people are.

[at_a_remove]

I think that selecting the "right" people may be key here.

Some time back, the child of some friends died, rather badly. This was a child I knew. They asked me to go through the police report because they could not bear to do so, just to see if anything was missed. In the interests of shielding them, I did. I had to detach in a peculiar way, and that may be while I have been able to attend autopsies and such.

Could I do it forty hours a week? I don't know, I won't claim to it, but I think looking for some kind of quality like that would be where to go until AI takes this over -- and frankly I think that will be a long time coming.

[jka]

> Not everyone who sees this stuff is scarred for life.

Psychological trauama and PTSD appear fairly prevalent for first-responders (worldwide)[1].

And first-responders tend to receive a lot of community support, respect and hazard pay in return for what they do.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_and_first_responders

[mschuster91]

> Do we just sit back and say "let's stop subjecting those poor officers from having to see evil things"? Of course not. We hire people with strong stomachs and a strong sense of duty. Not everyone who sees this stuff is scarred for life.

I happen to know cops. The suicide and dropout rate for those in IT evidence and sexual crimes departments is enormous.