Cleaning Up the Internet

We had a case today where a man posted a video of himself raping a woman.  He will be prosecuted for that.  In thousands of cases, people have been prosecuted for buying videos and pictures of children being sexually abused.  In the ones I have seen parts of, as part of a law enforcement investigation, the kids are not willing participants.  In rare instances, murder or mutilation of a person will be photographed and posted on someone’s Facebook or Twitter page.  We hear about theses kinds of things in only a fraction of the times that they are actually recorded, posted and viewed by others.  So when I read a story about a woman hired by Facebook to review content for these kinds of events, I was not surprised.

The Guardian published the first one of these type of articles in May as a reminder that some of the stuff on the Internet is terrorist related and the content is about killing people in gruesome ways and posting those videos on the net.  It then falls to people hired by Facebook, who by their own accounts are undervalued and under appreciated, to remove that content.  There are several public stories posted that show how difficult that job is and how hard it is to view this kind of thing every day.  I am somewhat sympathetic with people who do not have to look at the criminal side of the Internet every day.

Law enforcement sees that side, and does not like it very much.  You see the side that shows what parents do to their children in the name of discipline, or what husbands do to their wives for a more obscure set of reasons.  You see criminals, like robbers, swindlers, credit card and identity thieves.  As a class, criminals are not very nice people, but most of the time you could run into one on the street and never know.  Law enforcement looks for those people and usually finds them, so they do know.  This gives them a jaundiced view of people overall, but protects the rest of us from having to deal with this kind of thing.

So, it should not be a surprise for people who are employed by Facebook to find this kind of disgusting content, that a minority of people will do bad things and some of them will even be so stupid as to post those things on the Internet.  But, what these employees are finding  is much worse than a guy Snapchatting while he drives drunk into the side of a building.  The Internet is a collector of every kind of evil thing a person can think of.  Someone will pay money for that, or at least look at it a couple of times.

Now, what we should wonder is why only now is Facebook paying people to review content on the Internet?  A fair question with an easy answer:  Congress has finally realized that social media has done nothing to police itself, and was considering legislation to require that.  Now, all of a sudden, Facebook and a bunch of others, are thinking about what they might do to regulate some of the most offensive things they have allowed to be posted on their media.  They waited years to do this and way longer than they should have.  Spare me the “it costs money to do this and will impact Facebooks bottom line” routine.  Facebook has tried to pretend that content is free speech - anyone can say anything.  When it finally caught up with them, they let their employees say what a tough life they have.