We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Have you ever wondered how sites like Facebook and Twitter ensure that offensive material doesn’t reach our eyeballs?
The issue became a hot topic earlier this month when Steve Stephens uploaded a video to Facebook which showed him murdering an innocent man. The video remained on the site for two hours, prompting criticism that Facebook still has a long way to go in its content moderation efforts.
Filmmaker Ciarán Cassidy’s latest documentary examines the strange world behind seeking out and deleting offensive content before it reaches a mainstream audience.
He joined Marian Finucane to discuss his trip to Bangalore, India, where a small army of moderators spend their days scrubbing the world’s social media sites and mobile apps for vulgar or offensive images.
If you post a picture online, chances are someone in one of these offices will see it and deem it acceptable or unacceptable. Facebook, for example, bans images of nudity or extreme violence, and moderators have the power to instantly take it down with the click of a mouse.
It’s not a particularly pleasant job, as Ciarán discovered. Employees are set a target of 2000 photos an hour, and it’s estimated that an average 20% of these images are vulgar or unacceptable. One person interviewed in the documentary "described it as like working in a sewer". As Ciarán explained:
"If you think about the worst of humanity – and that’s not an exaggeration – you’re thinking about child abuse, you’re thinking about murder, you’re thinking about graphic images of porn. This is the kind of thing coming before a content moderator and their job would be to view this material and remove it from the site to make sure you don’t see it."
Ciarán teamed up with The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen to make the documentary, which you can watch here.
You can listen back to the full interview here.
