As a kid, I was completely blind to what the internet held. We had a computer and had dial up, but I never really used it often for things until I got into middle school and I didn’t explore that much other than an online community called “Gaiaonline.com” which I did for my friend. At the time MySpace was extremely popular, but I didn’t do anything with it because my focus was on the video games at the time. I’m a pretty blissful person that lives in ignorance. Happily in ignorance.
Internet 101:
1) Don’t click on random links you don’t know the context to
2) Don’t talk to strangers and give away information
I remember I used AIM (Aol Instant Messanger) a lot to talk to my two best friends which was the cell phones prehistoric version of instant messaging since none of us had cell phones and if we did talk on the phone, we had three way calls on a line talking for hours upon hours until I had to switch phones because the battery would die on the phones. (Cordless) I was talking to a stranger and when my dad confronted me the next day about it, I denied it of course because I was too ashamed and he said he had tracked the time the internet was in use and could find our conversation log. I was ashamed and didn’t do it again.
The anonymous identity people have shows a very sick sick side to themselves because they believe nothing can trace back to them or that usage of free speech became this warped empowerment. What’s worse the fact that there are twisted people like this out in the world that enjoy torture and all these very cruel violent acts of stimulation or the fact that someone, somewhere out there shares this sick twisted fantasy which motivates the other to continue and accelerate this behavior to prove they’re not alone and share an identity.
The idea of cleaning up because of the Grandma Problem seems like an impossible task because of how much stuff is uploaded and even though there are moderators that work around the clock sifting through the offensive imagery to take it down, there is still so much that goes unchecked. I mean that’s how I found the image that scarred me forever.
Censorship when it comes to social networking seems to be brought up in this ideal light where a uptopia of connections and networking is done, when there is a dark side of these spaces that goes unchecked.
People always tell you not to click on random links without knowing the context and I know why. Like the lady had mentioned in the article about the one graphic video that has haunted her and stayed with her even though she is out of the business of moderation.
My horrible experience that has destroyed my eyes
I was on facebook looking at a video posted by IGN on Dragon Age and I was scrolling through the comments and clicked a random imagur link that someone posted and….
—> I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but essentially it was Necrophilia Pornography.
It popped up so fast, but the image is burned into retinas and will forever scar me because it makes you really wonder that the hell are people thinking and doing with THEIR time? It doesn’t take much to find this type of content even when you’re not looking for it.
The PTSD that people must experience from having to sift through the content they do and battling a war that they can’t even hope to keep up with is extremely terrifying. I think about all these horror movies I’ve seen and feel like the “last standing survivor” that endures all the traumatic graphic violence physically or psychologically would need COPIOUS amounts of therapy and drugs to stay sane after seeing what they’ve seen (or what they did).
Makes me nervous about the Internet taking full advantage of the act of free speech which warps into this perverse society that lives in the cyber space. Such as craiglist adult categories or the B columns of 4chan.
When the 3DS came out, one of the applications that came with the game system was SwapNote, which allowed the gamer to connect with other people to send pictures and notes to others. The idea was great; execution wasn’t there. SwapNote was disabled because people would send dick pics and other things, which became a problem since company couldn’t stop the exchanges and since the company caters to many gamer age groups. Swapnote was taken down and disabled, but they recently re-released it.
Article: http://kotaku.com/child-predators-were-using-nintendos-swapnote-service-1459304126
As I was discussing this with a friend, he told me about a time when 4Chan banned images of My Little Pony for a period of time in the past. So the saying became “Mods are asleep. Post Ponies” which quickly became popular and a growing trend.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mods-are-asleep
susancinderella 
Feb 07, 2015 @ 06:10:48
So our posts were very similar: this is horrid, people are disgusting, those employees must suffer so much. It’s so true though. Like I had mentioned in my post, I’ve never even thought about content moderation before. I didn’t know it existed but after I read the article I asked myself “how could I have not known about this?”. It just makes sense now.. Someone out there has to suffer in order for populations to enjoy something that’s so globally used. That alone makes the job even harder… I can’t imagine how much crap they have to go through a day. I understand the necessity of having a job, there’s no way getting around that. I’m just not sure I would even consider that if they walked up to me with the offer after reading that article.