![]() Social media's growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies' ability to police the borders of their user-generated content-to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked. They won't continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet's panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. I say appears because I can barely begin to make sense of the image, a baseball-card-sized abstraction of flesh and translucent pink plastic, before he disappears it with a casual flick of his mouse.īaybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”-the removal of offensive material-for US social-networking sites. If the space does not resemble a typical startup's office, the image on Baybayan's screen does not resemble typical startup work: It appears to show a super-close-up photo of a two-pronged dildo wedged in a vagina. Past the guard, in a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-brown hair. Up one flight, a drowsy security guard staffs what passes for a front desk: a wooden table in a dark hallway overflowing with file folders. When I climb the building's narrow stairwell, I need to press against the wall to slide by workers heading down for a smoke break. ![]() But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies' most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics' stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila. The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services.
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