Here’s a troubling story: what’s life like for people who are paid to troll websites looking for photos that need to be removed? More:

The surge in Internet screening services has brought a growing awareness that the jobs can have mental health consequences for the reviewers, some of whom are drawn to the low-paying work by the simple prospect of making money while looking at pornography.
“You have 20-year-old kids who get hired to do content review, and who get excited because they think they are going to see adult porn,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer at MySpace. “They have no idea that some of the despicable and illegal images they will see can haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

I cannot imagine it. When I was a youngish teenager in the early 1980s, there was a fad for a video called “Faces of Death” — video and still images of dead people, often after having met some gruesome end. It wasn’t sexual, but it was a kind of pornography. I watched part of it, but it freaked me out, and I worried that I would never get those images out of my head. I finally did, somehow — they faded — but it taught me a good lesson: don’t risk exposing yourself to images that might be with you forever. Once you’ve seen something, it’s hard to un-see it.

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