It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt by this as "snowflakes" and the content they're exposed to as "silly and non-threatening." From what you're saying, there's also a big difference between what you were dealing with and what this article is talking about: in your case it was only still images, and only "regular" porn (and I assume they probably had to monitor every image posted if it was "a long time ago" so overall they were not exposed only to that content); in this case they're reviewing videos content including not only porn but also violence and sexual abuse, that was pre-flagged by an AI so with way less rule-abiding content mixed in.

It's modern slavery.

Just because it's beneficial for them doesn't mean they are getting exploited.

Looking at porn or something similar or actually really bad , changes people.

Even if it means they get a lot more insensitive

While one can blame corporations, the most blame lands on the Indian government(s). Decades and decades of corrupt local, state, and central governance has led to dire poverty and high levels of unemployment. The current and past leaders have had no care to fix it, and it’s only getting worse. Their incompetence is what creates these kinds of jobs as alternatives to abject poverty and death.

As an Indian living in India's Silicon Valley, I am calling BS on this.

"All young (early 20s) women" doing explicit content manual filtering is not normal. No Indian Family would allow their daughters (and sons) to take up such a job if they knew about it.

As the article itself points out, the workers are drawn in by non-explicit/non-pron image annotation and then switched to psychologically harmful work when they cannot leave due to job-needs/contracts-enforcement.

This is pure bait-and-switch scam which has severe psychological effects on the women (and men) involved and should not be blithely hand-waved away.

For a detailed understanding of the psychological harm of explicit image annotation see this documentary (not specific to India) The "Modern Day Slaves" Of The AI Tech World. Undercover reporter does annotation of explicit images for AI but is so traumatized by what he sees that he quits in two weeks. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSZFUiElls

This argument is somewhat true in the small case (e.g. if you are starving and the only job for you is shoveling bodies into a furnace, may as well).

But I think the reason people have a problem is that giant multi-national corps have created a system where shoveling bodies into the furnace is the most profitable option for these desperate people.

The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?"

Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it. Its a complex issue because it was critical work at the time. However, only a little while later, we realize the system we had was broken and poisoning the planet, ourselves, and the workers. I'm sure many coal miners are remiss that they no longer can work the mines, and many companies would be happy to employ them if it was profitable enough, but ultimately its not a good system for anyone. And if I hear that "coal miners in high demand in China" I'm not going to say "oh I'm so glad they have employment" I'm going to ask "why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"

> I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.

I think THIS shows that you've never dealt with people in abject poverty. Just because you live in poverty doesn't mean you lack humanity.

People lie, cheat, steal, sell their bodies and kill to subsist in poverty. Whatever it takes to survive. That is totally separate from the toll that that type of surviving takes.

It is true that employment and pay are good. The question is a) are proper protections in place for workers and b) does pay adequately compensate for traumatic stress. Studying the issue is valuable, particularly given the potential for labor exploitation given the power imbalance between the largest, most powerful organizations in the world and a labor base which as you point out could otherwise be disenfranchised.

I think with this info we can assess whether the wage is indeed competitive. Otherwise claiming "well they're getting paid" can be used to justify exploitative labor practices or negate the need for ethical inquiry.

Also calling psychological harm metaphysical is questionable. Is PTSD experienced by American troops coming back from deployment metaphysical? Not necessarily comparing these cases in degree.

I'm not sure what invoking neocolonialism adds to the discussion. Best to engage on a factual rather than ideological basis.

I generally agree with the broader point you're making, but I also think there's nothing wrong with pointing out how messed up it is that that's the reality of the choice. The whole point of improving society is to eliminate this kind of dilemma

That's verging on a white man's burden kind of argument. We can help tackle global income disparity without telling poorer people that they should be happy we're offering them the jobs we don't want to do ourselves.

I think that it is grotesque to take some moral high ground while global companies are exploiting the most desperate workers that they can find. They don’t give a shit about poor people in India, they need people with marginal English language ability whom have little or no worker protections.

People will do what they have to do to survive. But this is hurting these people who long suffer long after the social media company’s contractor discards them.

People who raise these concerns don't understand true poverty. They might have seen it during trips but don't really "grok" it. That's one place where the expression "First world problems" is relevant. Being able to pay for housing, food and some degree of safety is an immense improvement in life quality versus the previous state with poverty and no videos.

You could use this argument to justify street prostitution.

Im with you... to some extent. I come from parts of the world where there is real material poverty and so this is tangible food on the table and a better life in some sense...at least for her family if not for her.

The question though is why that material poverty exists in so many parts of the world that were once pretty advanced civilizations.... Colonialism def had a part to play there. So the irony isn't lost that western powers exploited and extracted from civilizations and cultures that were different from theirs..all in the name of progress of course..and now those parts of the world are dependent on the breadcrumbs thrown their way by different western powers.

> Some one has to moderate these videos

Do they? Maybe you can never get to zero, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any ways to materially reduce the frequency of such videos being uploaded.

Of course, many of these ways will probably affect growth metrics, and since these directly translate into revenue, I can imagine how the economic tradeoff that was made here looks like...

I'm not sure what you mean by 'metaphysical' here, but I get the impression that you're dismissively trivializing real psychological problems by using that word.

An improvement in material conditions does not straightforwardly make up for these problems. What if they cause the viewer to commit suicide, or be so distraught they can no longer continue to work? People who do this work tend not to be able to do it for very long.

You also seem to be evaluating this by taking the current order of things for granted, as if it were not possible for this kind of thing to not be necessary in the first place. Quite a stunted imagination.

Yeah, let's save these poor women by taking their jobs away...

how privileged of you! thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you while you centralize my brain power and start charging me a tax on thinking. GTH

I was not big fan of Liveleak, but I really enjoyed WatchPeopleDie community, one could learn a lot in the comments about how to be safer in the enviroment (I'm aware they moved to website, but it's not same anymore, too much friction to visit it)

after being the regular visitor of WPD I stand at the junction waiting for my turn shielded by the traffic lights pole and always look in the eye of the driver when crossing the road, especially if it's tall truck

some ppl don't realize how many lives actually WPD saved, but hey now we have victory nobody is exposed to this disturbing content and making silly jokes about death, right?

This is obviously a flippant comment that shouldn't be taken seriously. But the loss of LiveLeak seems like the loss of the journalism that the Internet was supposed to bring. There were a lot of odd things posted on there with some unneeded commentary but it was a place that would post unfiltered content that other places were scared to post. A lot of it was disgusting that I wouldn't watch, but it's weird to think that the Internet is censored now in a way where it's hard to even find it.

You can find areas of propaganda where site rule breaking will be allowed if it serves the interest of the owner, but you really have to seek it out. It's even weirder that the latest generation is self censoring common words so they can show up on sites like TikTok. Billionaires buying newspapers to censor seems less strange but sadly something I also didn't expect.

I can only imagine that watching abuse/porn all day long may cause a person to change- possibly even lead to suicide.

I see a contradiction. If they are not responsive, their psyche is safe and there are no reasons for them to be compensated much more than minimum wage workers.

They are volunteering! They need the money.

Who is making them work this job?

I get why a firefighter may be asked to take risks to save lives. We should not ask these women to take these risks so that billionaires can become trillionaires.

I had the same thought. I think the job is unavoidable BUT it needs much better screening. There are already countless of mindless individual who love watching that content, why not hire them? Finally a job sex offenders are good at.

It could also be a Clockwork Orange therapy for them.

If the choice is let's have [facebook|linkedin|bluesky] and someone has to suffer like this, or we don't have those things, than let's not have them.

The onus should be on the job provider to care for their employees too. They have a responsibility to ensure their employees are not physically harmed while they work. And to help or compensate their workers for any work injury. Right? Why not use the same criteria for psychological harm too? They should be provided psychological counselling. And note that this is not a new industry.

RealID + Ban + Legal Enforcement (depending on the content)

It will cut this work down by 90%, but I doubt many people here will go for it.

A finely tuned set of heuristic triggers for fear, horror, disgust, etc. You might as well ask why pain is so painful.

>>given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast ...

That is the best case scenario. Mostly women roll beedis(a kind of needle sized cigar) on which you get like 1 paise per 10 rolls or something like that. Or worse do assorted labor chores which can really sap one's soul real fast.

Even with all that women actually have it a lot better than men. Men literally die and are reborn every day in most parts of India.

Just drive 30 kms North of Bangalore, and you will see abject poverty scenes. People scavenging bovine dung for fuel, children with flies, no clothing. The ever present scene is always that of an elderly person with pencil thin legs wearing shorts he likely is wearing since a decade with nothing but boiled rice and salt water+turmeric to eat daily. 8 - 10 hr power cuts are the norm, that is if you can afford electricity at all. Most health care is either entirely absent, or you have to travel to the nearest metro and hope you don't die out of hunger getting treatment there. I could go on but that is life here.

£260 a month is actually great for some place like this.

I see few people coming from Jharkhand and working as waitresses in my state.

Also, your first link mentions Bihar not Jharkhand.

Yeah what’s the alternative to moderation…no moderation?

There is an argument.

but maybe you have an idea of how manual labor feels (people always do some of it) but no idea how this type of horror feels and what it does.

That's false. We expect that jobs are growing at both ends of the income distribution with AI [0][1] - yes there are a ton of data annotators and content moderators now, but literally the overwhelming majority of us also expect to see an expansion in standard SWE and SWE adjacent roles with AI/ML vibe coding becoming the norm.

The reason you are facing job losses right now is because Joe in Cary who learnt to code at a bootcamp can't justify being paid $180k a year when I can hire Jan for $90k in Karlin [2] or Jamila for $60k in Koramangla [3] while maintaining equivalent performance and output. Having a president pass an executive order to distract from the Gold Card announcement [4] also played a role [5] just like we warned would happen.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/267037e8-a71f-4025-acca-f441fe712...

[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/d6fdc04f-85cf-4358-a686-298c3de0e...

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/prague-...

[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[4] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...

[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-03/alphabet-...