Responsible Career Choices: Who Keeps the Internet Safe?

What would you do if you were faced with a career choice between a job in a stockroom or an equally low-paying job screening the Internet for highly disturbing and offensive content? With the first career choice, you will work hard on a daily basis, handling tough customers in a demanding environment. With the second, you won't be working with tough customers, but you'll subject yourself to highly offensive and abusive imagery -- things that no person should ever need to watch. It won't be for a few minutes. It'll be for eight hours a day, and you'll only be paid $8-$12 an hour.

No matter what emotional harm and mental degradation you experience, you'll be making the Internet a safer place, and at the end of the day, you may feel satisfied that you protected one more young child from witnessing graphic pornography. You may also need to attend counseling or therapy. Which career choice would you select? Do you think that you could do it?

While the Internet has revolutionized the way that society exchanges information, it has also opened Pandora's Box with a slew of violence and disturbing content. Good, bad, and ugly, the Internet is a place where our collective imaginations and intellect can run free. When it comes to graphic child pornography, murder, and animal abuse, however, some images need to be corralled-- especially before they reach our children. Somebody needs to keep us safe.

When it comes to screening the Internet, nothing replaces the human eye -- not software or algorithms. When someone flags an offensive video on YouTube, someone needs to investigate further. Where there is demand, there needs to be a supply, and thus evolved the job of the Internet content screener, with millions of positions at screening firms in the United States. The work has also expanded globally into firms in India and the Philippines.

When you pursue this line of work, it's almost impossible to fathom what you're getting into. You expect adult pornography and television-style violence, but when you actually see the horror of what's out there, you're shocked. To some extent, screeners become numb from the thousands of images that they see on a daily basis. Does everyone get used to it? Not at all -- at one firm, an on-site psychologist reported that the 500 employees felt depressed and angry with decreased sex drives.

In fact, the job is so tough that the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, a Congressional industry group, has recommended that the federal government provide tax incentives for corporations to provide mental health services to its content screening teams. Otherwise, when you're making $8-$12 an hour, where do you turn?

You may have never thought about it, but remember next time you flag a video or photo for inappropriate content -- somebody, somewhere, in the United States or overseas, is looking our for you and your family.

Photo Credit: Jared