Roaming the World of Cyberspace

In order for Facebook to be advertiser-friendly, the porn cops employed by the site has the responsibility to delete risqué content as well as enforce decorum among the members. In the high tech headquarters of the Facebook Company in California, Simon Axten is busy monitoring some potentially pornographic actions. It is a picture of a young couple who is lewdly making out on the pop up screens. It might be gross, but it is definitely not against the rules that has been prescribed by Facebook so Axten had no choice but to pick out his judgment regarding the appropriateness of the image.

After this, there is a young woman in her underwear and is using her hands to cover her breasts. Axten deems the image as coming pretty close the rules which they have created and appropriately named in Facebook. Some of these include the Crack Rule, the Fully Exposed Butt Rule and the ever-popular Nipple Rule. He goes through several photos and ok-ing all of them. He was able to deliver his verdict of seventy five pictures out of the four hundred and thirty eight thousand, eight hundred and forty eight pictures that were flagged by the users of Facebook. He deletes a picture of a girl blowing out a pot smoke cloud and underage users who are drinking from liquor bottles.

Unmentionable Work Over at Facebook?

Axten is twenty six years old and is a Stanford graduate working for the one hundred and fifty-strong company which helps to keep the Facebook site clean. Facebook adequately describes their staffers as some sort of internal police force, tasked with moderating and regulating the decorum of their users, seeking out spammers and actually working with law-enforcement agencies if there are crimes that need to be solved. It seems as if their work requires them to be part-hall monitor while at the same time part vice cops. Such employees serve as the key in the efforts of Facebook to keep their site as a place that is also good for utilization of corporate advertisers – with efforts bigger and more serious than previously successful sites such as MySpace and Friendster. These old companies had been shanghaied by sexual displays and pornography, according to David Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick is the author of the yet-to-be-released book “The Facebook Effect”.

A Tricky (But Serious) Job

Such is definitely seen as a tricky job. They need to insist that users will have to sign up using their real names and caution against posting photos that are R-rated – this is their way to widen the entire user base in order to include some upscale professionals while at the same time know that when censorship is too heavy handed it could upset and turn off their existing members. Kirkpatrick also said that should Facebook be polluted by wild kids dong crazy things, then the act will destroy their ability to attain their ultimate vision of creating a service that would be used by everybody.