MEET THE ‘NET DETECTIVES’
Web content moderators scrub the web of nudity, violence and porn so that you won’t be flashed without warning. Here’s how they do it
Imagine waking up to a video of a beheading playing on your social media feed. Or swiping through a dating app to find a prospective beau baring it all in a desperate attempt to land a date.
Across the country, there are teams of young engineers whose job it is to make sure that doesn’t happen.
They’re called web content moderators, and their task is to scrub websites of illicit, explicit and undesirable content, using a set of rules or guidelines.
This involves sifting through about 2,000 images per hour, or up to 5,000 dating profiles a day. Porn, violence, gore, nudity, scammers, sexual solicitation are the most common violations.
“About 20% of what moderators view every day is offensive. The kind of clients we deal with in India do not have extremely graphic content like rapes or child pornography showing up on their portals,” says Suman Howlader, founder of Foiwe Info Global Solutions, which started providing moderation services in 2010.
The guidelines change depending upon clients. While nude pictures are always deleted, some permit bikini pictures — as long as the setting is a beach and not a bedroom… because the latter could be a case of revenge porn.
On dating sites, male users cannot have female display pictures; group pictures, baby pictures and pictures of porn stars as DPs are a no-no too. For commercial websites, the guidelines focus on potential scammers.
THE SECRET ‘WEB POLICE’
In a small office in Bengaluru, about 100 employees of Foiwe sit in rows, leaning into their screens with rapt attention. They spend eight hours a day weeding out thousands of unwanted photograph, video and text uploads on social media channels, dating and e-commerce websites based in India and in countries such as Spain, the US, UK, Canada and Russia.
The coolest team to be on is the fraud detection or ‘Fake Team’.
“We like to think of ourselves as detectives,” says team leader Rajeev Srivastav, 29, with a grin. “We’re constantly on the lookout for profiles that are not genuine, trying to determine which accounts are real and which are fakes.”
Armed with a database of blacklisted IP address, it’s up to these guys to bait and block the scammers and spammers.
“Suspicious activity includes users who declare their ‘undying love’ to 100 people at the same time, telling sob stories and asking for monetary help. Also, widows saying they want to share their property with someone trustworthy. To be honest, my work doesn’t seem very different from that of the cybercrime departments of the state police,” says Srivastav, laughing.
“Protecting lovesick users from being duped by heartless scammers makes me love my job a little more.”
The fact that India’s web content moderators get more scam alerts and semi-nudity than, say, beheadings or child pornography makes their job easier.
In the US, for instance, moderators for Microsoft were reportedly exposed to so many grisly videos that they sued the company claiming they had developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In India, job interviews for web content moderators typically include questions about social media experience, to ensure that the exposure they are set to face won’t come as a complete shock.
“We look for good observation skills. Being intuitive is a major plus point. Then they have a two- to three-week training session where we brief them about what the job entails,” says Suresh Reddy, founder and managing director of InfoEsearch, a Hyderabad-based digital services company that began content moderation five years ago.
“We have counselling sessions twice a month and if someone is uncomfortable with a particular type of moderation, we transfer them to a different department.”
A GROWING MARKET
The content moderation business in India is growing in metropolises like Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata.
“This part of the industry is something that was non-existent ten years ago and is all set to pick up, because of the huge and growing demand,” says Aravind Rao, chief operations officer at InfoEsearch.
Howlader adds that almost 80% of his company’s revenue now comes from commercial content moderation. The sevenyear-old company also offers software testing and IT consultation services.
Squadrun, which provides app-based commercial content moderation in San Francisco and Delhi, has a workforce of 75,000 freelancers and moderates for e-commerce websites.
Siddharth Pillai, co-director of Aarambh India, the country’s first Internet hotline to report online child sexual abuse imagery in partnership with the UK-based watchdog Internet Watch Foundation, cautions that moderators must take frequent breaks and get periodic counselling.
However, all’s not dull and dreary in the world of moderation.
“Recently, while moderating a website I came across that hilarious video of US President Donald Trump appearing to push the Montenegro prime minister at the NATO summit in Paris. I showed it to my colleagues and there were ripples of laughter across the room. We’re often among the first to see such viral content,” says Santosh Kumar, 29, a content moderation team leader at InfoEsearch. “We get to have our share of fun.”