Big job keeping worst of filth off web

It may soon be easier to block internet porn: The agency that controls domain names has said it will consider adding .xxx to the list of suffixes people and companies can pick when establishing their identities online.

The California-based non-profit agency, ICANN, effectively paved the way for a digital red-light district to take its place alongside suffixes such as .com and .org, finally ending a decade-long battle over what some consider formal acknowledgment of pornography's prominent place on the internet.

While the move might help parents stop their children from seeing some seedy sites, it would not force porn peddlers to use the new .xxx address - and sceptics argued that few adult-only sites would give up their existing .com addresses.

Still, it is seen as a symbolic step in the opening up of internet domain names and suffixes, coming on the same day the agency said it would start accepting Chinese script for domain names.

That got Mack-line to thinking: who polices the internet's more lurid side? A bit of research found out that in the United States, an army of people earning fairly low wages views some of the worst depravities destined for the internet.

Wages are usually between $US8-$US12 ($NZ11-$NZ17) an hour.

Ricky Bess (52) spends eight hours a day in front of a computer in Florida.

He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography.

One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.

Mr Bess sifts through photographs that people upload to a big social networking site and keeps the illicit material, and there is plenty of it, from being posted.

His job is obscure but one that is repeated thousands of times over from suburban Florida to outsourcing hubs in the Philippines.

With the rise of websites built around material submitted by users, screeners have never been in greater demand, online columnist Brad Stone writes.

Some internet firms have tried to get by with software that scans photos for things like large ares of flesh tones.

But nothing is a substitute for a discerning human eye.

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.

Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer at MySpace, said some young people get hired to do content review and get excited because they think they were going to look at adult porn.

"They have no idea that some of the despicable and illegal images they will see can haunt them for the rest of their lives."

Telecommunications on Demand president David Graham compared the reviewers to combat veterans, completely desensitised to all kinds of imagery.

The company's 50 workers viewed a combined average of 20 million photos a week.

Mr Bess insisted he was still bothered by the offensive material and acknowledged the need to turn to the cubical workers around him for support.

A common strategy at websites is to have users flag questionable content and pass on material needing further human review to cheap outsourcing companies.

Microsoft, Yahoo and MySpace all outsource some content review, NYTimes online reported.

YouTube, a division of Google, is an exception.

If a user indicates a video is inappropriate, software scans the image looking for warning signs of clips that are breaking the site's rules or the law.

Flagged videos are then sent for manual review by YouTube-employed content moderators who, because of the nature of the work, are given only 12-month contracts and access to counselling services.

Facebook, the dominant social network, which last week reached 500 million members around the world, has relied on its users to flag things like pornography or harassing messages.

That material is viewed by Facebook employees in California and Dublin.

Although the consequences for many of the people viewing the questionable content are disturbing, parents should be grateful that someone tries to remove the worst of the worst.

Some questionable content is always around - you only have to look at the court news around the country.

The content viewers become depressed or angry, have trouble forming relationships and suffer from decreased sexual appetites.

If you work with rubbish, you will get dirty.

But their contribution is surely underestimated by many of us.