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Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That must've been a pretty disgusting story to investigate. I heard people at Facebook that have to moderate this kind of stuff develop PTSD-like problems.

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Microsoft itself was sued for PTSD over their anti-child porn efforts.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft...

"That must've been a pretty disgusting story to investigate."

Please, this is limited to law enforcement. DO NOT TRY TO INVESTIGATE THIS yourself. Looking and finding CP could be considered a crime already in your jurisdiction.

At the same time, citizen investigations can be powerful things.

Investigating corporations for flippantly allowing child abuse materials to be indexed and distributed on their platforms should never be illegal. The fact that Israeli investigators did this research, rather than Americans (Google is an American company) shows that our own low enforcement clearly isn't doing it's job here.

I have a toolchain for finding child abuse content on Youtube, and I use it to report videos to Youtube for takedown. It's absolutely insane that I can be held criminally responsible for finding this content - but Youtube is immune from consequences hosting it.

Some of the videos I have found had millions of views.

Many that I have reported have not been taken down.

Yup. I knew someone who did this at BlackBerry. Very emotionally taxing work. Thankless too.

I had a gig that was adult-industry-adjacent and the constant exposure to plain-jane porn became exhausting; I cannot imagine what this work is like.

Radiolab did an episode[0] last year where they talked to Facebook content moderators.

[0]: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil

I mean how many shares of seeing folks beaten or even executed before it gets to you.

Me ... 1.

I’m still haunted by some of the things I stumbled across many years ago when I was exploring FTPs just to see what I could find. That all ended the day a video labeled “AMV 1” turned out to be (at least the few seconds I saw) a very young boy tied up and being raped. I reported anonymously to the FBI, but even then it was clear they were overwhelmed and I never heard back.

If I had to see that kind of thing as a job, I’d die.

My friend is on the other side of this fence, FBI agent, that's had to conduct surveillance of child pornographers after tips like this to collect sufficient evidence to prosecute. Luckily, he was eventually transferred into a white collar crime division.

There are a lot of revolting, but vital jobs out there. Hats off to those with the psychological disposition to handle them, even if not sustainable in the long term.

When I was looking at which professional direction to take, I started looking at government jobs (mostly law enforcement) and spoke with some industry people. My take was: Get prepared to look at a LOT of ugly stuff. Also heard horror stories that just thinking about it, makes me want to puke and punch somebody at the same time.

I have several LE friends including a homicide investigator. The common refrain is “you loose faith in humanity”.

Which consequently, is why mental health for LE is of the utmost importance. Frankly it’s a public safety issue.

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