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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

Every time I imagine what it must be like to watch countless highly disturbing photos and videos, with the only goal being to prevent the public from seeing what you’ve seen (and not even being able to privately vent about it), I shudder. Timelines with your friends’ baby photos come at a cost.

I wonder whether content moderation jobs at Facebook et al. include sufficiently stringent pre-screening of candidates for mental fitness.

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The idea that _any_ humans could be screened to do this job is questionable. Otherwise mentally fit people can become mentally unfit when constantly bombarded with images of child abuse, or worse.

It is the least bad solution we have to the most bad problem. I'm not saying you're wrong, but the discourse around how we can find the "right" people to do this job assumes that such people exist and aren't just desperate for a job.

I used “mentally fit” here to mean not so much “normal” (whatever that means), and more like “fit for the job”.

I used to read my daily news on bestgore.com when it was still alive.

Some people would be perfectly fine doing this kind of job.

You probably don't want to employ the type of people who have no problems dealing with the worst type of content the web has to offer.

Perhaps some of the people you’re referring to are otherwise unemployable for related reasons—by giving them paid work, FB could do public good.

Of course, that is assuming they truly have “no problems dealing with” that content, and won’t be triggered by it to do something terrible in real life. Not sure if mental health care is/can be advanced enough to tell precisely.

Like clinical psycopaths? I mean I guess psychopaths don't have to be bad persons.

I read a story about a cop that watched all seized child pornography to catalogize the victims and perpetrators. It probably requires a certain kind of person.

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