Facebook Porn Cops team: Facebook has a Team of Porn Cops. Facebook employs "Porn Cops," who roam the digital corridors of the social networking site and make sure no one's posting pictures with too many pink pixels and the like. This team's work is being profiled over at Newsweek.
The Sunny is a high-tech headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, California, and Simon Axten is cuing up some porn. It is serious, but not against the rules, so Axten stroke a key to judge the image correctly. Next up: a young woman in underwear covering her bare breasts with his hands.
Axten says,thinking the image. There is nothing high minded about his judgments: at Facebook, they have developed semiformal guidelines as Fully Exposed Butt Rule, the Crack Rule and the Nipple Rule. In this photo there is no areola, he decides, so it stays.
The next Image is a man clad only in a black thong and angel wings. After releasing a verdict on 75of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by facebook users. buff guy soaping up in the shower (OK); girl blowing an epic cloud of pot smoke (he deletes it); an underage user drinking from two liquor bottles at once (ditto).
The nipple is usually already upset hundreds of thousands of people recently when it was used to remove images of women who are breastfeeding, but only those with a hint of areola showing.
Facebook describes these staffers as an internal police force, charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes.
Facebook wants to avoid slipping down the same porn slope that MySpace lost its footing on, which is why it employs this team of 150 people to keep the site clean.
The range of policed activity is broad at Facebook. A division named users operations looks at all content that users say is harassing or that shows drugs, nudity or pornography.
Behind all these actions is a team of employees who set guidelines and make judgment calls, each earning in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year—making "porn cop" one of the quirkier entry-level jobs to emerge in the Silicon Valley economy.
Another branch, Site Integrity, watches for spam and phishing attacks on the Facebook network, and using "white hat" hackers to find vulnerabilities in the system. Employees describe their roles in a police analogy from the "cop on the beat "to under cover" in case of an employee who interferes spammers and hackers in various dark corners of the Internet.
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