Sting perverts face 14yrs’ jail
Secretive outsourcing firms used by web giants to remove vile content
PAEDOPHILES caught in stings by members of the public and undercover police posing as children will get tougher sentences.
The Crown Prosecution Service said offenders will be charged with the same crime as those who target actual youngsters, and face up to 14 years in prison.
Until now they could only be charged with an attempted offence.
The CPS’s Sue Hemming said: “The charge will be the same regardless of who they are in fact communicating with.”
ACONSTANT stream of child abuse, self harm, violent pornography and terrorist atrocities fill their screens. They are the thousands of workers in the Philippines charged with cleaning up the internet for as little as 70p an hour on behalf of tech giants raking in billions.
Facebook, Google and Twitter outsource to firms who employ thousands of mostly young content moderators in places such as Manila, a hard-hitting documentary on BBC4 tonight says.
With pressure mounting on the social media firms to clamp down on harmful posts online, there is a lot of filth to filter.
Facebook alone removed 865.8 million posts in the first quarter of 2018, it has revealed – 3.4 million of graphic violence.
Some moderators have a staggering daily target of 25,000 posts to delete.
As The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners shows tonight, it can all take a huge toll on workers, with at least one believed to have killed himself after being damaged by what he saw.
One anonymous worker said: “I’ve seen hundreds of beheadings. It’s not really healthy. In this world there’s really an evil who exists. We need to watch for it. We need to control it, good or bad.”
The show could not be more timely. Yesterday saw a pre-inquest review into the death of Molly Russell, 14, who took her own life after viewing disturbing selfharm material online.
Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck claim it was a similar situation with the content moderator who killed himself. In an anonymous email a co-worker told them: “He was very close to me. I was worried, why he is not coming to work. My team-mate hung himself.
“He was specialised on self-harm live videos. Bad effects of content moderation. The company kept it secret. Business as usual.”
An unnamed psychologist, who claims she saw the worker several times before he died, said he asked bosses if he could stop moderating self-harm videos.
She said: “Three times he informed the boss to transfer him. They should do something. This was a cry for help.”
Moritz says: “The whole staff were told it had nothing to do with their work but instead he had ‘private reasons’. “But according to his colleagues it was pretty obvious, this guy had to do with all kinds of self-harm videos and asked several times to get a different job.”
The German directors believe other content moderators have killed themselves after the job became too much. “We were told, but again we can’t prove, that this is not a single case.”
Much of the vile content deleted worldwide is sorted by artificial intelligence, but some must be doublechecked by human moderators, who are paid between 70p and £2 an hour.
The directors say in their investigation they discovered a very secretive industry ANONYMOUS MODERATOR TALKING ABOUT PAL’S SUICIDE Molly died after viewing self-harm pics with huge pressure put on workers not to talk about their work.
Hans says: “The companies use a lot of private policies and screen the accounts of the workers to make sure that nobody is talking with outsiders.
“There’s a real atmosphere of fear and pressure because there are reprisals for the workers. They have to pay a £8,500 fee if they talk about what they’re doing. They even fear they will be put in jail.”
Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of Information Studies at the University of California, says outsourcing gives the firms legal distance from the work.
“When Facebook and Google claim they don’t have employees in Manila, they can legitimately do that by using the labour of a third party firm,” she said.
Google said it had no moderators in Manila when the show was filmed, and it provides counselling to its reviewers.
Twitter said it has “regular on-site counselling, training, and person-toperson support” for its staff.
Facebook said: “We ensure that everyone who reviews content for Facebook is provided with extensive psychological support and wellness resources.” ■ The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners – Storyville, airs tonight on BBC Four at 9pm.
My team-mate hung himself.. the company kept it secret, business as usual