For six years, from 2012 to 2018, my job was to read and delete the most inappropriate comments on a conservative news site. Not all the inappropriate comments. Just the most inappropriate comments. Hundreds of comments an hour. Thousands of comments a day. Tens of thousands of comments a week. More than a million comments a year.
I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”
Some of the choices people make on the internet, and in life in general, remain baffling to me. Not just in their intolerance, but also in their sheer stupidity. I would tell a user that he was banned, and instead of choosing a unique user name to throw us, he would immediately sign back up with a nearly identical name. Just an extra “L” to SickOfItAlll. Some people are really loyal to the name they use to be racist on a website.
It was an odd turn of events for me to be working there at all. The site (which I'm not allowed to publicly name) is one that I knew some friends and family read, but it wasn’t for me. I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy. A friend got a job there, though, so I applied too. Liberal or not, the rent needed to be paid. After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.
Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.
If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.
I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”
Some of the choices people make on the internet, and in life in general, remain baffling to me. Not just in their intolerance, but also in their sheer stupidity. I would tell a user that he was banned, and instead of choosing a unique user name to throw us, he would immediately sign back up with a nearly identical name. Just an extra “L” to SickOfItAlll. Some people are really loyal to the name they use to be racist on a website.It was an odd turn of events for me to be working there at all. The site (which I'm not allowed to publicly name) is one that I knew some friends and family read, but it wasn’t for me. I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy. A friend got a job there, though, so I applied too. Liberal or not, the rent needed to be paid. After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.
Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.
If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.
by Adam Sokol, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angus Greig
