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From a sunlit room in a small village in Devon, a 65-year-old woman is watching you. Patrolling the internet, she admonishes cyberbullies, trolls and spammers.
Jennifer Paine is an online moderator for Emoderation, a company that manages social media for companies in sectors ranging from banks to children’s online games, from HSBC to Moshi Monsters. Described as the “granny of community moderation”, her first foray into the industry was as far back as 1997, when she managed chat rooms and forums in the dark days of dial-up.
Today her job is not unusual. Dotted around the globe is an invisible army of men and women monitoring our online comments. Some, like Ms Paine, work from their homes, often part-time, juggling the work with other jobs or caring for family. Others are based in the modern-day incarnation of the call-centre, in the Philippines or India. They work for specialist companies, who take on the work on behalf of some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley.
These workers sanitise the internet for users and guard the reputation of brands and social media sites.
Hemanshu Nigam was chief security officer at News Corp and MySpace, where he oversaw moderation operations, before setting up SSP Blue, an online safety and privacy consultancy. He estimates that “con mod” – as he refers to content moderation – companies employ well over 100,000 workers and are expanding around the globe. Given the sometimes nuanced and emotional nature of the work,moderators are almost always required to have a college education, he says.
The emotional hazards of the job, he notes, are “reviewing images depicting every type of horrible human act from child exploitation to beheadings”.
However, the bulk of the work is removing libellous content or managing trolls, the people that set out to start arguments or post threatening or inflammatory messages online.
If I'm the owner of a chat site, the last thing I want is a-holes, vulgar language and images, and perpetually contentious posters.
Weeding out people like that appears to be what this little old lady and her associates are hired to do.
Now, if there are people out there who are hired to spy on us for our personal peculiarities, financial dealings, or political beliefs, then report same to Big Brother, THAT I have a HUGE problem with.
Yep, and a damn fine job they have been doing lately.
