On The Beat With Facebook's Pornhounds
Everybody knows that Smutslayer, omnipotent Facebook god of purity, is responsible for smiting pornographic images that mortals foolishly try to upload to the site.
What not so many people know is that Smutslayer doesn't do all the work himself. He's got a trusty team of decency deputies working full-time to fight for truth, justice and the absence of boobies.
Newsweek reports that of the 850 employees Facebook has on its payroll, 150 are part of its User Operations division, which is charged with tracking down user-submitted violations of the site's code of conduct, which disallows nudity, porn and drugs. Fully exposed butts, visible crackage and nipples give your photos a one-way trip to Deletionville. Also, no calling anyone a "jerk." Seriously, that's also a code violation.
Part hall monitors, part vice cops, these employees are key weapons in Facebook's efforts to maintain its image as a place that's safe for corporate advertisers-more so than predecessor social networks like Friendster and MySpace. "[They were] essentially shanghaied by pornography and sexual displays," says David Kirkpatrick, author of the forthcoming book "The Facebook Effect." It's a tricky job: by insisting that users sign up under real names and refrain from posting R-rated photos, Facebook hopes to widen its user base to include upscale professionals, but at the same time it's aware that too much heavy-handed censorship could upset its existing members. "If [Facebook] got polluted as just a place for wild and crazy kids, that would destroy the ability to achieve the ultimate vision, which is to create a service for literally everyone," Kirkpatrick says-and then its potential for profits would disappear, too.
The virtual lawmen make about $50,000 a year, a pittance in the face of the $900 million in revenue the social networking site is expected to make in 2009.
The presence of the porn cops isn't much of a surprise, considering Facebook has been known to go a little George Orwell on its users. Of course, the company has also caved when its overbearing policies are brought to light.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for a classy, porn-free online network, and it's tough to forge cleanliness without substantive muscle.
Yet it seems that the powers of these gumshoes could somehow go to more productive ends. Who's up for waging a campaign to get these watchmen to eliminate all those obnoxious quizzes?
Facebook's 'Porn Cops' are Key to its Growth [Newsweek]
(Photo: pbm)
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Comments:
The worst part of those damn quizzes is that every single one is a different app, so you have to hide them all individually. I tend to just hide the people who take them a lot now.
You got my vote for elimination of the quizzes!
Looking at photos all day in search of the indecent ones? Where can I fill out an application?
$50,000 to play on facebook 40 hours a week? My wife would love that.
My GOD.
How do I get that job?
Seriously?
50,000 a year?!
"The virtual lawmen make about $50,000 a year, a pittance in the face of the $900 million in revenue the social networking site is expected to make in 2009."
It seems to me that wages should be tied to the skills required to perform the jobs, not how much revenue the employer has.
Why is the pay of the employees doing the enforcement even relevant (other than to tie in with the union pimping from the Boston Globe piece, I guess)?
@YamiNoSenshi: my status yesterday : "enough of the stupid quizzes, OK?"
I deleted everyone of those apps. Oh yeah, don't send me a some "gift" either.
If you are an adult, and your pictures are of consenting adults, there is no reason why they should take your content down. They should just impliment a privacy filter for adult content.
@Yossarian: The skill in this case cruising around facebook and looking for naughty pictures. If you think about it, 50k is not bad, considering there are a lot of jobs that require more of you and don't pay as well.
Hehe, I recently wrote a blog post about all those stupid quizzes, fans, pick 5, stupid photos where you can tag people etc etc that facebook fills my news feed with. Down with all that!
@Conrad: Other than the code of conduct to which the submitter agreed when he signed up?
Or do you think restrictions like that can be ignored and that people should be allowed to do whatever they want on a privately owned site?
@nursetim: $50K for looking for unacceptable pictures on Facebook is, imo, a hefty wage. These "virtual lawmen" make out pretty dang well as compared to "actual lawmen" on the pay/skill/risk continuum.
@YamiNoSenshi: Yeah! Im always hesitant to hide the person though, because I like seeing status updates, photos, etc. Just hate those annoying quizes T_T
@Conrad: Except kids would then just lie about their age to see the stuff.
You wanna post your porn and nude pics there are other places on the web to do so.
@dave_coder: Totally agree. I'm glad Facebook is enforcing their policies, and I think more places on the 'net should do this.
disallows nudity, porn and drugs
Interesting, in that all my friends that posted photos from this past weekend's Marijuana March haven't been taken down. I'm thinking either they haven't been found yet, or Facebook is letting this one slide. Who knows...
@hindenpeter83: The article says that they sift through photos that have been flagged by other users. I guess nobody finds your friend's stuff offensive?
Remember, before you think it's a dream job. You don't get to always look at pictures of interesting people doing interesting things. You also have to look at page after page after page of 'Billy's birthday party', 'Samantha is 14 and loves (insert teen group here)!' and, the ever fun, 'people you don't want to see in swimwear'.
@FoxBearDog: It sounds fun, but as an employee of a company that has porn-screeners of its own (not Facebook), I can tell you it's not a fun job after the first few hours. Many of the people who post explicit photos are not attractive 20-year-old women. They are older people. Or out of shape people. Or people who look like your dad. Or people who are doing inappropriate things to the exhaust pipes of their F-150s. It's all fun and games until Grandma shows up naked.
i put up a picture of a house in india with a small swastika on it and they took it down...allot of houses have em...the nazis stole it from india...
@Conrad: YEah i agree I don't want to see people's nasty boobs or crotches sorry but most of the world is not that attractive....
I did this very job at Photobucket and made way, way less. Sorta pisses me off, given that I probably saw things while working at Photobucket that would turn these folks into blubbering babies. Not that there's any amount of money that would make viewing child porn any easier to stomach.
Seriously, by the time I quit that job, I was a mess. In fact it's the reason why I'm such a cynical bastard even now, two years later.
I doubt the problem is anywhere near as bad over at Facebook, but even so, I echo Catskyfire's sentiment. Even if it's got 100% less child porn than Photobucket did after the Google and Yahoo image dumps a couple of years back, it's still not a dream job by any stretch of the imagination.
Though why anyone would think it is is beyond me. @_@
@catskyfire: It's pretty much like working at a photo lab. Mostly really boring, and the really interesting stuff is what you really don't want to see anyways.
But, I never made anywhere close to $50k/yr working at the photo lab. Plus, I had to deal with customers.
$900 million in revenue?!
I think not, insiders say they made $265 million last year: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/zuckerberg-facebook-revenue
I think Zuckerburg's own projections for this year are around $350-$400 million, and he's supposed to be the optimistic one.
This is why some of the smaller social sites are better like tribe.net ( no affiliation ). You can post whatever pictures you want of yourself.
@Peter Shipley:
Ironic: someone posting as a facebook user and then directing people toward sites they should be using instead of facebook.
@Conrad: Well, it is a private website. If Facebook want to maintain some level of standards on the site, so be it.
At least they let you know what their code of conduct is. It should not be a surprise to anyone that they enforce it. Heck, even if they wanted to take specific content down "just because they want to," it's well within their rights at site owners.
@hindenpeter83: Did the pictures display marijuana?
I doubt it.
If a picture has the word "nudity" on it, it wouldn't be taken down. Only if it contained nudity.
@INTPLibrarian: Well they can do whatever they want with our content forever so why not? Personally, I love looking at half-nudie pics on facebook. It makes my computer science class go that much faster!
$50,000/yr in Palo Alto = $28-30,000/yr in the Midwest
@Stephanie Haller: Can't say for sure that this is where these guys work, but note that Facebook is based in Palo Alto, where 50 grand might buy you a cup of coffee. Gotta factor in that cost of living. 50K in New York or California doesn't go very far.
I guess because it never occurred to me to be so stupid as to put my bits up in public, I'd never stopped to consider that FB was so porn free. Some people just have no social filter. :-p
@biggeek: But why did they decide to put these folks in Silicon Valley? This is an easy "alternate office" choice right here.
@urbanturban666: I believe the symbol is the mirror image of the swatika in India. I'm not sure if both exist, but I do remember having a conversation with a former co-worker from India who told me that...
If people want to see that so much, why don't they just start a site similar to FB that features that? If I didn't think pron was so gross, I would start the site myself.
@downwithmonstercable: I already have that job.. just not officially.. and probably not for much longer.
@Cyberxion101: I was on a Grand Jury for a year and a half. I can't talk about the cases, but in the child porn ones (we got a lot of them), they always graphically described the photos/movies/titles while everyone on the jury sat there and squirmed.
@Beki: Good! I'm glad FB is continuing to enforce their policies despite whining moms wanting to put their boobs on the internet.
@synergy: On behalf of everyone on the intertubes, thank you for not posting nekkid pictures of yourself. In return, I shan't post any of mine, either.
Are they still deleting pictures of mothers breastfeeding? Haven't heard about that one in a while.