That was good article and I think something really needs to be done to make content moderation more humane.
This quote from the article
“It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human.”
reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1].
Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the video that made him quit. He was 24 years old and between jobs in the Bay Area when he got a gig as a moderator for a then-new startup called VideoEgg. Three days in, a video of an apparent beheading came across his queue.
“Oh fuck! I've got a beheading!” he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. “Oh,” he said, “which one?” At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. “I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it.”
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
This quote from the article
“It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human.”
reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1].
Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the video that made him quit. He was 24 years old and between jobs in the Bay Area when he got a gig as a moderator for a then-new startup called VideoEgg. Three days in, a video of an apparent beheading came across his queue.
“Oh fuck! I've got a beheading!” he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. “Oh,” he said, “which one?” At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. “I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it.”
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/