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From a sunlit room in a small village in Devon, a 65-year-old woman is watching you. Patrolling the internet, she admonishes cyberbullies, trolls and spammers.
Jennifer Paine is an online moderator for Emoderation, a company that manages social media for companies in sectors ranging from banks to children�s online games, from HSBC to Moshi Monsters. Described as the �granny of community moderation�, her first foray into the industry was as far back as 1997, when she managed chat rooms and forums in the dark days of dial-up.

Today her job is not unusual. Dotted around the globe is an invisible army of men and women monitoring our online comments. Some, like Ms Paine, work from their homes, often part-time, juggling the work with other jobs or caring for family. Others are based in the modern-day incarnation of the call-centre, in the Philippines or India. They work for specialist companies, who take on the work on behalf of some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley.
These workers sanitise the internet for users and guard the reputation of brands and social media sites.
Hemanshu Nigam was chief security officer at News Corp and MySpace, where he oversaw moderation operations, before setting up SSP Blue, an online safety and privacy consultancy. He estimates that �con mod� � as he refers to content moderation � companies employ well over 100,000 workers and are expanding around the globe. Given the sometimes nuanced and emotional nature of the work, moderators are almost always required to have a college education, he says.
The emotional hazards of the job, he notes, are �reviewing images depicting every type of horrible human act from child exploitation to beheadings�. However, the bulk of the work is removing libellous content or managing trolls, the people that set out to start arguments or post threatening or inflammatory messages online.
As new laws are discussed in the UK that could see internet trolls jailed for up to two years for threatening behaviour, these content moderators are on the frontline, monitoring trolls� behaviour and reporting it to the owners of chat forums and social networks.
Like beauty, a troll is in the eye of the beholder. Susanne Kendler, a 40-year-old Austrian who lives in London and works for Emoderation, is keen that people do not misuse the term. �If you comment on a news story forcefully and someone doesn�t agree with you, calls you a troll and reports your comments, that does not make you a troll.�
One London-based woman employed by Tempero, a content moderating company, who prefers to remain anonymous, reflects on the motivations of trolls. �People troll for all kinds of reasons,� she says. There is the �original troll�, where someone posts something with the sole aim of riling other users. �They are just bored and often don�t realise the kind of upset they can cause. Best defence is simply to ignore them.�
Others, she says, hold views that the majority of people find abhorrent. �They feel angry and marginalised. [They are upset] that others aren�t as racist or homophobic as they are, so they go online to rant in relative safety.� These ones, she believes, are scared that their way of life is disappearing. �It�s sad that the only way they can deal with that is by shouting at other people online.�
The third type she identifies are those who go out of their way to make others� lives miserable. �It would be easy to dismiss them as scumbags � and some undoubtedly are � but some also have problems of their own.�
Ms Kendler says in many cases trolls want to be acknowledged. �Those sorts of trolls can go on forever, no matter what others in a conversation say, no matter if facts are against them, they just enjoy the baiting.�
Sari Kiiskinen works from her home in Tobago when her four-year-old son is at school and during the night when he sleeps. She observes that some commenters try to get as many fellow users banned as possible. �They celebrate the fact with comments such as �Yeeaahhhhh!!! I got X, Y and Z banned just now . . . Follow me let�s go and troll some guys to get them banned�.�
The job, muses Ms Kiiskinen, is good for staying on top of trends and expressions used by children and teenagers. �I like to think I am one of the more informed people in my age group for new English expressions, profanities, memes invented and trending in North America, Europe and Australia.�
Stumbling across horrific images is a professional hazard. Wendy Christie, chief production officer at Emoderation, says part of her job is to identify moderators who are suffering distress. The tell-tale signs are becoming angry, uncommunicative or physically unwell. �I�ve dealt with lots of tears, anger. People are angry over why there are people like this in the world. Images of children hit people the hardest.�
Many companies now offer psychological support because of the nature of the material that moderators witness, Mr Nigam says.
Ms Kiiskinen says she can maintain a professional distance. �Seeing or reading unpleasant or distressing content is part of the job like attending to emergencies in real life is for the police, doctors, firefighters. Usually I don�t think about work after I finish the shift.�
They also face abuse themselves. At Tempero, the anonymous moderator says she has been accused of being all �races, religions, political persuasions and even, memorably, French�. It can be hard dealing with outpourings of hatred, she notes. �There are some very angry people in the world.�
The topics that rile people are astounding, she says. There is the predictable: immigration, politics and animal rights. But she has seen huge spats break out over driving � �everyone thinks they�re a great driver� � and minor celebrity stories. �All you need is two or three people with strong opinions and you have a bunfight in the making.�
A particular bugbear for her is spammers, especially those who target sites providing support to vulnerable people. �What kind of sick mind do you need to have to carpet a forum for the recently bereaved with adverts for kitchens?�
The moderators also scan online communities for potential suicides. Ms Christie advises her charges that they are not counsellors; the best they can do is report people to the client companies who may be able to trace them through personal information and IP addresses.
The busiest times are holidays. Ms Kiiskinen says there is an increase in work in these periods as people have time off and visit online communities. Again, she draws a parallel with the emergency services, noting that they are generally busier in the festive seasons. �So, the number of users violating the guidelines also tends to rise.�
Ms Christie does not want to overstate the dark side of the internet. The majority of the work is to delete comments that have breached a company�s code of conduct. The most typical reaction is that people feel they are being �censored by someone with an agenda�. In reality, their comment has been taken down because it breached contempt of court or libel law, or contained some extreme swearing or a vicious attack on another commenter.
As the anonymous moderator likes to see it, her job is simple: she is tasked with �keeping the internet civil�.

Busybody bitches are a lot worse than trolls.

Busybody bitches are a lot worse than trolls.