Human Smut Scanners Needed At Photobucket And MySpace

from the another-job-for-the-digital-working-class... dept

We were just talking about digital working class jobs and how web filters suck — so is it any surprise that some companies are now rapidly trying to hire human smut scanners to spend their days staring at photo after photo to try to catch “bad” pictures quickly? Specifically, this is targeted at MySpace, which gets so much bad publicity due to those who misuse the site. With politicians looking to fight back against MySpace, the company has been building up its own roster of employees to monitor as much as possible — and also put pressure on Photobucket (the main service used by MySpace users to host images on MySpace) to hire a similar group of human watchers. As the article notes, software just isn’t cut out for the job — so, instead, people sit at computers and scan approximately 200 random photos per minute, looking for anything naughty to delete. Quite a job, right? Of course, both companies might find a better solution in distributing the workload. I’m reminded of Jay Walker’s plans to build a massive “neighborhood watch” system, whereby people stuck at home could earn some extra money staring at photos taken from security cameras at various locations. Distributing the workload over large groups of people and paying them for each photo reviewed could help these companies build up their “human” filters much faster. In fact, this seems like just the type of set up that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was designed to do.


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Comments on “Human Smut Scanners Needed At Photobucket And MySpace”

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29 Comments
CrazyPunk (user link) says:

looks like a job for CrazyPunk

I am also interested in getting a job as “smut scanner” 😛

I am currently stuck home with no decent income. I like working with pcs and am good at it too and am willing to “scan for smut” as a job. It should be easy, look at a pic, click GO or DEL and move on to the next one. Kinda like the rating system on ratemyfinger/poo.com but then with two choices.

Dam says:

It's The Same Thing.....

Having a wide open internet and services like Myspace being essentially unregulated is the same as having open borders. With no supervision or policing going on, the scum floats to the top, drowing out the users.

It’s said by many that most of the illegals coming across the border are good hard working people, and I believe that. But the criminals get all the attention. So it is on Myspace and others like it.

JimmyJamz says:

Ironically...

the ad pictures on myspace are borderline. So they want to promote and gain ad revenue through smutty pictures but turn around and scold users for uploading them? Don’t get me wrong, as a youth group leader I agree with the “smut filter” but just logging in I’m forced to view a huge picture of a scantily clad woman. Tone down the ads to, I mean it’s a site basically designed around high scool age kids. Do they really need to get a “date” or get “laid tonight”?

In the trenches,

Jim D.

Eileen says:

calm down about the immigration, seriously

LOL… nice analogy. teenage brats with nothing better to do than post suggestive or lewd photographs of themselves on myspace are to the god-fearing clothed variety just as mexican criminals are to hardworking illegal immigrants! Why didn’t I think of THAT before?!

Ben McNelly (user link) says:

In other news...

Immigration officials have recently begun cracking down on naked immagrants coming over through the internet. A spokesperson for IIF (Internet Immigration Filter) says that they are in need of computer literate backwards southern people, who hate naked immigrants, to help with thier filtering. “We have not come this far to let our warped little children’s lewd and indecent photos be outshadowed by naked mexicans..”

Anonymous Coward says:

The trouble is not all the “bad” pics are necessarily overtly naughty. I admit I’ve perused a fair amount of adult content over the years, and I’m forever coming across pics that aren’t clearly explicit that I know were pulled from adult content sites. If a profile has basically no content but yet has 900 friends, and a pic that looks like she could be a stripper, it’s a good bet it’s just a “scam” profile.

... says:

A very interesting job becoming available but I guess it’s necessary. The bad part about it; from my understanding it’s these same people that post the “bad” pics on myspace that feel they are violated/ invasion of privacy when people they do not want to witness the pictures see them. When will they realise it’s a public domain or at least why put them up if you don’t want the world to see.

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