Desensitization is certainly a thing. The first few times seeing those things were shocking and disturbing. Then it got exciting. Then it got boring. I don't actively look for that content, but never having left 4chan, I still sometimes stumble upon it and it causes no big reaction. I think I could totally do that content moderation job, I have to admit some morbid curiosity about what I would stumble upon exists in me. The only content that never stopped to disturb me was violence against animals.

Talking with my "normie" friends about this I realized I am the odd one out. I wonder just how much consuming that content in my youth changed me.

It's a strange conundrum because ideally you want good people who are comfortable watching things good people rarely want to watch.

Don't have much experience with this demographic -- maybe there are more sane, emotionally healthy people watching snuff films for fun than I instinctively expect.

I found most of the videos less offensive than extremely graphic horror movies, which ironically I have less stomach for. If anything that subreddit made me generally more aware of my surroundings and safer in my daily life.

It'd be like having a jury pool made up of serial killers.

These kinds of bottom of the barrel places of employment tend to have their policies and procedures tuned to make sure employees do things the way the company wants them done. That's just the nature of doing an unskilled, non-laborious job for a BigCo. There will be automatic spot checks, audits, reviews, etc. It is no different than the cube farm on the next floor where they review images of documents that AI systems have flagged as possibly fraudulent. Such systems are likely in place already for their current moderators.

Yes, but their hiring pool tends to be "everyone".

Those procedures might not work as well if your hiring pool is explicitly confined to "the people who watch ISIS torture videos for fun". I suspect standard policies and procedures include "fire the people who get off on this stuff".

They have little power to abuse and obvious accountability. If they block kitten and baby pics and allow people being tortured to death they'll get fired quickly after the inevitable shitstorm.

Insane and unhealthy or creepy doesn't neccessarily mean dangerous. Even if they got twisted pleasure from it they would be gross but not inflicting actual harm. It isn't like people are being brutally murdered to give them kicks - they aren't a source of demand.

Probably not, since there are no documented instances of any snuff films ever found.

Thanks to Wikileaks publishing the Dutroux Dossier in 2008, we know hundreds of snuff films were recovered from the notorious pedo-rapist Marc Dutroux.

Just because the police keep those films as sealed evidence that are never published does NOT mean snuff films are an Urban Legend. I can see why the police always keep snuff films secret. Imagine what would happen if snuff films were uploaded all over the Internet? There would be mobs of angry villagers armed with torches and pitchforks descending on jails and prisons to lynch pedos. It would make harassment from QANONs look like school yard bullying.

(The films were, according to your reference, made only for blackmail purposes, and therefore certainly not made for enjoyment of any viewer, nor were they ever distributed to other people for their enjoyment. The reference does claim that people were killed in a specific place which was also filmed, but does not, what I can see, explicitly state that any murders were actually filmed, other than incorrectly calling all the films “snuff” films.)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-pinch-of-snuff/

Regardless my point was just that in my experience many would consider them 'snuff' even if it doesn't meet the exact technical definition.

And those people would simply be wrong.

I mean, let’s back up a bit. Why is it important whether or not “snuff” films exist? Because many people want to believe the common urban legends about it – i.e. that there exists an (be it ever so small) underground production and market for it, even though, by all accounts, this does not exist, and has never existed. Believing such urban legends helps people feel justifiably horrified and helps validate their cynicism; basically the same reason why many people believe many other urban legends. However, no movies fitting that particular model have ever been found to exist.

If anyone wants to to be picky about the definition and claim that some movie or other fits the definition of “snuff”, or is “considered” to fit even though it doesn’t(!), this is only because they want to be able to say “see, snuff films exist!”, and thereby validate their preexisting belief in the urban legend. But this is a motte-and-bailey fallacy; it tries to defend the urban legend (which is hard) by trying to defend a technical definition of a word to be slightly wider than it really is (which is comparitively easier). Luckily, even though it is easier to defend, this latter position is still demonstrably wrong.

Edit: and saying things like "well clearly these people are already traumatized if they're seeking this out, it's not good for them, we shouldn't give these jobs to them" seems laughably paternalistic when the alternative is to traumatize more people by making them look at it instead.

People come to their choices with all manner of existing problems and conflicts, and they don't always do things in their own best interest.

Human are so diverse.

Is is really hard to believe that there are people that are not negatively affected by this ?

That they seek it out doesn't mean they're not messed up.

Maybe it helps dealing with that trauma. Maybe it makes the trauma worse. Maybe there was no trauma to begin with, and the person was seeking out that content simply due to morbid curiosity, but then it evolved into something else. Maybe there was no trauma to begin with and no trauma appeared after the exposure. Who knows.

But just because there are communities on reddit with people seeking that kind of material and not going on crazy violent sprees doesn't mean that it doesn't negatively affect them. It could be the case, but we should probably look into that first before jumping to "obvious solution" claims.

tl;dr: we gotta do more research and weigh pros and cons before simply declaring "we have an obvious solution, let's just hire all those gore content enthusiasts to moderate violent content, because they already do it on their own and don't seem to be going crazy in obvious ways due to it".

That would do wonders for the Facebook brand.

Look at how much trouble they got in when it was revealed they were using Onavo (even before acquisition).

My basis for thinking this is I've seen videos like that before and clicked away quickly. It's disturbing, but I think I'm okay.

Obviously not everyone, but they are there.

Serious question, I don't mean this facetiously. I think is an extremely complex question and I wonder if introducing someone who is openly comfortable with gore is dangerous to the psychological health of the company.

For example, at a previous company a co-worker publicly shared, without a trigger warning and in great detail, a very gorey thing he enjoyed watching to relax. Lots of people were extremely disturbed by this -- not disturbed by him, per se, but disturbed that he shared this without any kind of warning. I don't even resent him despite myself being pretty disturbed because what one considers normal is subjective, and if you regularly relax to this content you probably don't realise that this might not be anyone else's cup of tea. But it really makes me wonder -- what if the guy who sits next to me starts telling me that ISIS beheadings are relaxing to him?

It seems like if you acknowledge that: a) Terrible job exists b) Terrible job is necessary

You should also allow for a person to do terrible job without thinking that they must be a terrible person by extension. Otherwise you continue the well-trodden history of certain professions like hide-makers, executioners, or coroners being ostracized from society for doing the job we told them to do.

I agree that I wouldn't personally spend time with said person, but my question was less about personal social responsibilities outside of work. My example I pointed out happened at work, during normal work hours, in a social space where people have inherently less control over who they surround themselves with. This is the part of it all that is fuzzy to me, and I don't have a clear answer for.

And while a lot of content moderators do focus purely on clicking thru things, a lot of other ones still regularly interface with the company. I used to work at Discord, where content moderation of this level (and traumatic nature) was a constant concern. As engineers you may be staffed to work on a tool to help with moderation. Or you may be working on some fancy AI to help sort and tag unsafe content. And this is only from the product engineering perspective; content moderators will have to work with customer success to create content policy, or enforce bans for unsavory behavior. So I don't think they really are siloable away from the rest of the company, and I'm not even certain that that is a humane way to treat them.

I wouldn't assume "watches this stuff" and "is psychologically capable of tolerating this stuff" are one and the same. Those people might be actively harming themselves by watching the content. That's one thing when they're volunteering to do so (though that's an interesting conversation in and of itself) but it's quite another when Facebook is paying them to do it.

One day I had an anxiety attack because I had a dream that I had a heart attack and suddenly I had a deep fear of randomly dying.

All the random deaths on that sub started to really get to me, I even started to get depressed. It became harder and harder to watch content on it. Eventually I unsubbed from it and gradually bounced back to normal.

I don't really regret it because it gave me a new perspective on life and how valuable it is. But I would be lying if I said it didn't fuck me up in a way.

take ER doctors. they daily witness human trauma far worse than viewing horror show videos and images. do you ever hear about ER docs who become depressed or mentally ill from being exposed to so much horrific human suffering? Doctors have a personal sense of doing good in the world through healing. They witness so much trauma that they become so desensitized that non doctors often criticize them for seeming so detached and for treating human bodies like mechanistic processes. But doctors have to be somewhat detached in order to do their jobs well.

It's not specifically about ER doctors. Anecdotally, I'm a lawyer, and they warned us in law school that lawyers have abnormally high rates of substance abuse and depression, and constant jokes to the contrary not withstanding, most lawyers believe they do good. Emotionally hard jobs are hard, even if they are indisputably good.

Yes you do! But I would imagine it is at least somewhat offset by the fact that they are doing a lot of good: they are saving people from death while also witnessing death. I think a content moderator would struggle to feel such a strong sense of purpose.

The entire point of this is to find those who deviate enough from normal to not be as impacted.

For example, instead of showing one person torturing another person, a DL filter could turn the scene into two teddy bears torturing eachother.