The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed Wired

For this week I read The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed WIRED. This article was about contracted content moderators, and what their job entails. While I was reading this article, all I could say was "WOW". I immediately begin to think about the numerous of inappropriate content that I see on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter daily. If people abroad and within the United States are constantly monitoring what types of content people see everday, then I couldn't even phantom the amount of inappropriate content that I would see on my social media sites without their patrolling. As it is now, I think I am already overly exposed to inappropriate content as it is, so again I couldn't even imagine.

Unpacking: The author of this article brings up the concept of the Grandma Problem which is the reason why companies hire content moderators. The Grandma Problem seeks to essentially protect our grandparents from being exposed from inappropriate content. According to the author, “Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in larger part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user-generated content—to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked.” Now this paragraph seemingly sounds innocent. It can be easily read without much thought being put into. “Oh look we want to protect our grandparents from indecent material online, how sweet!” However, it is important to note whose grandparents were deemed as needing the protection. Although race/ethnicity/nationality may not seem like a factor in this paragraph it actually is. This becomes even more apparent when you continue to read the article. Filipinos and Filipinas who do the same content moderation job in the Philippines as Americans do in the United States are only paid $314-$500 a month. Yet, the American moderators are paid about $20 an hour, and sometimes even more. Also, the American moderators see this job as a last resort, and have a few perks that come with the job (i.e. being able to watch what they want on the other screen, and counseling options although they don’t know how to access them). The Filipino and Filipina workers do not have any of these perks, and I would bet all my money that they work much longer hours than the American workers do. Not to mention, this job is in high demand in the Philippines which means they are more susceptible to abuse in this job field because they are easily replaceable. So, whose grandma are we really protecting then? If Filipino and Filipina workers aren’t being protected in the workforce then I think it may be very reasonable to conclude that companies aren’t looking to protect their grandparents. Also, it may be reasonable to conclude that their grandparents are also some of the content moderators, whereas in the United States the content moderators are typically recent college graduates.

The Grandma Problem is about protecting white Grandparents. In fact, most laws and policies in the United States were created to protect the white population. This may sound like a stretch but it really is not. In my last post, I brought up how blacks and Latinos children and adolescents are the biggest consumers of social media. In regards to social networks, grandparents would actually be only a minority of users. Most grandparents are not using social media sites to keep in contact with their family members, and yet the reason why companies feel the need to hire content moderators in the first place is to protect those who do not have a huge presence on social media. Why not protect our biggest users? That's because the biggest users are low-income kids of color. In this case, the minority has a much bigger voice and is of more concern because money plus whiteness talks and matters in this world.