It’s Not Me, It’s Porn
Work is work; for some people it just happens to involve a lot more porn.
BY: NOAH FARBERMAN
I give a loud first impression; it’s a lot to take in and polarizes how people think of me. I’m working on it. But I’m not always Mr. “happy-go-lucky” motor-mouth. I need quiet days to recharge. I’m very aware of this shift and how it looks from the outside perspective, and I’m comfortable enough with myself to not be bothered by the almost guaranteed “how’s it going” text I’ll receive after quiet days. All this is to say: I’m thankful that I don’t do porn.
It’s one thing to be loud in class week one and head-in-a-book week two, but to be moaning in a JOI and silent in an edging video would be a much more noticeable turn, even for a porn persona.
This odd mental jump got me thinking a lot about perception and how we start to judge people’s personalities based on first descriptions. When I hear someone’s a writer, I expect, based on my own experience with writing and comedy communities, to meet passionate people. Oftentimes a split between big personalities or quiet souls, writers for me will always have a spark that flicks on when the conversation turns to their area of love. So, was it a desire to write that made me like this or being like this that made me want to write? In order to answer this little self-analysis, I reached out to someone whose career path strayed very far from my own.
When I learned the writing topic for June would be Love and Sex, I immediately remembered someone my girlfriend had talked about. She had mentioned having a friend whose significant other’s job was possibly along the lines of screening internet porn to make sure it wasn’t rape. That is a terrifying sentence to consider in itself. And one that I wish didn’t need to exist. And even more so, what kind of person could handle that sort of job?
Before we meet this behind-the-scenes porn worker, I should explain for those who are thankfully still unaware. The internet is only as clean and safe for viewing as it is thanks to companies that hire people for the exclusive task of sifting through disturbing images to make sure they are not violating any specific website code or breaking any laws. Imagine being paid to go through Reddit 50/50 for eight hours, but the link is always the dark and horrifying image and it’s up to you to decide whether or not the image is too disturbing, illegal, or horrifying to stay on the public domain. Now imagine doing that for a porn website.
In order to protect the privacy of the company they work for and their identity in general, my new friend of a friend will be referred to as Jane Doe.
Going in I expected someone quiet. Someone haunted and reserved whose passions lie macabre and interests reside in darkness. Someone who lives with all they’ve seen. I can’t unsee most things; I still remember being pulled aside in middle school and being shown a clip of a boy falling off a dock and quite literally splitting his head. The image scarred itself into my mind for what I hope is not eternity. Jane Doe was reserved, like I expected, but she soon explained the reason to be a fear of breaking company rules.
I feel overwhelming stress about breaking work rules—old time cards could probably show how I would arrive to work over half an hour early most days just in case I had delays on transit, so I related to Jane’s concern immediately. And so when Jane expressed to me that our agreed interview time would end just as her shift started, I made a note of the time to ensure I didn’t make her late.
After a brief introduction and some technical issues (on my end), we got under way. I started off by asking for a description of her position.While Jane wears several hats in the company, we decided, for the interview, to focus on the video removal section. A large part of Jane’s job is reading reports sent by users and deciding if she should take action or not in regards to the requests. Reports being sort of the next level up from flagging a video; when you click a link that reads something like “I’d like this taken down” or “this should be removed,” you create a ticket. These tickets are sent to Jane and her team, who read them and determine if videos should or should not be removed from the website.
“What kind of videos do you get?” someone might ask. According to Jane, reported videos range from copyright claims (e.g. users who pay for personalized content sometimes re-upload those videos for public viewing) all the way to revenge porn (pornography filmed or uploaded without the consent of the model/victim). Because the site Jane works for allows a combination of paid content and user-uploaded free content, anyone with a username and password is able to upload videos to the internet. And while free range on media allows up-and-coming content creators and newly eager viewers to learn about the industry and try to find their way in, the same freedom allows others to use the platform for unfortunate purposes.
By now you’re probably thinking, “Can’t they build a software to detect these videos and remove them automatically?” The answer is: kind of. Jane explained to me that every video uploaded comes with its own genetic signature, a sort of fingerprint, and that every fingerprint is recorded somewhere on the website’s servers. So, while technology is not able to distinguish right from wrong, it can tell when a video that was removed is being reuploaded and will stop the upload, preventing the spread of illegal content. Unfortunately, that leaves the job of judging up to humans.
In doing research for this article, I had my editor help me search a keyword into the website Jane worked for. We were curious about how extensive the measures were for preventing as much as removing. Thankfully, searching for “rape” yields no results. But that opened another question; if the site filters keywords, how do these uploaders keep bypassing that barrier?
Jane was able to confirm that words related to “rape” or anything involving underage models or “lolis” are being blocked by the site (‘lolis’ are a play on the term ‘Lolita,’ coined by Nabokov in his book of the same name which chronicles the relationship between an adult man and a very young girl; the term has since been repurposed to represent women who, although over the age of eighteen, appear well under).
However, because the nature of the videos Jane must remove are unfortunately close in nature to fetishes like BDSM and consensual non-concept (re-enacting rape scenarios with consenting actors), uploaders will title videos with names similar to these categories. Titles like “real person’s name, brief description of act” will be used to avoid sensors. When I expressed concern about how to distinguish real videos from staged content, Jane reassured me that it is very easy (unfortunate that this distinction needs to exist) to distinguish acting from actual fear.
I asked Jane about the percentage of reported content and while she didn’t have statistics available, Jane was able to estimate around 500 tickets per day (tickets increased with COVID-19), excluding copies (some users will report videos many times to ensure a video’s urgent removal). As we got deeper into the processes of Jane’s work, I started to understand her days a lot better. As it turns out, most of the time a video will be clear enough to remove based on title or description alone, and as a soft rule the company airs on the side of removing videos.
I followed up by asking what procedures were set in place for finding videos that proved slightly illegal and problematic. Jane explained that in most cases, accounts are banned. She also told me that they follow national reporting guidelines for illegal content and such.
Jane wanted to make it clear to me that she didn’t want to seem apathetic when discussing this subject, and I want to make it clear to readers as well—talking about revenge porn and underage porn and anything else of the sort is not something we’re taking lightly. At all. With that understood, Jane did admit that porn itself was now something she was feeling apathetic towards. She explained that much like anything you do for eight hours a day, you’ll get a little desensitized to it. And while she let me know that her sex life and relationship have not been affected by work, her desire to watch porn for personal reasons is gone.
In regards to the idea that the videos were affecting her less and less, I asked if she was concerned about her mental health as a result of this sort of work. “I’m grateful in the sense that it doesn’t scar me, I’m not kept awake at night,” Jane assured me. I followed up by asking about measures set in place by her company, should she or any coworker start to feel like they needed help. Jane was very quick to say that her company provided adequate services (even during COVID-19) for the entire company. And it appears that the support system is working as Jane told me that “nobody has left yet from this team” for reasons of emotional drain or similar.
Finally, I asked Jane about how she ended up working this particular job. She volunteered to be transferred. It sounded like something she could handle, and Jane is someone who likes to take initiative. The same went for the others on her team. The screening process is being asked if people think they can handle that sort of work. And like Jane explained, the process seems to have worked as no one has yet left the team.
At this point it was getting close to the start of her shift and I was concerned about making Jane late for work so we wrapped things up. But I made it clear that Jane would be able to approve all that is written for this piece, something I felt was very important as Jane expressed concern prior to the interview, even asking me to confirm that I wasn’t trying to write an attack piece about her company. Which, in all fairness, is a great question.
In doing my own research I found a large quantity of negative articles externally and positive articles from within the company. But that wasn’t a surprise, for me or Jane. Porn is porn; certain groups find porn sacrilegious, for some it’s a way of life, and to others it represents something dark and problematic at the core. For Jane it represents proof that she’s good at working in tech. That she has a desire she didn’t know about and the strength and drive to commit to it.
When I first started preparing for this interview I thought I would be writing about how work should be emblematic of a personality, because it is a choice. And I still partially believe that, but I also believe that experience shapes us in every aspect. Even though Jane said that she felt lucky that she was able to sleep at night, she admitted that there was always the possibility that ten years down the road she might jump at something she didn’t realize she was afraid of. But that risk, Jane said, was well worth it knowing that she was cleaning up the internet.
