Artículo Fiction: 'I have the most dangerous job in the world: I censor dead bodies on social media' Articles

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Fiction: 'I have the most dangerous job in the world: I censor dead bodies on social media'

07 Junio 2017 15:19

He was used to seeing live-streamed suicides, animal brutality, explicit sex... but what he discovered that day would change his life forever...

I work from eight in the morning to six in the evening.

I thought the first days would be the hardest. In a way, they were. Certainly, since I've grown used to the horror, the visceral feeling of rejection that was my initial response has died down. Now I just experience a sort of lingering uneasiness at being submerged in these almost filmic scenes of horror and depravity.

Suddenly, I am one of those beheaded men, I am the suicide bomber for whom death is not enough (who seeks to make their death into the perfect spectacle), I am the degenerate who gets off on fucking animals.

They call us moderators, but that's a euphemism. Every time a complaint from a social media user reaches my inbox my heart stops. I go into a sort of trance, click on the link and attempt to blur my vision so I don't have to see the details of the post and can avoid having the image burned on to my retina.

But most of the time I don't succeed.

I've already lost count of the number of colleagues who've changed jobs on the advice of their psychiatrist. And I know it will be my turn soon.

The languages they speak are nearly always foreign, the locations far off and inhospitable: places it's hard for me to ever imagine living in.

But today was different.

The photo of the mutilated body on the bed had been posted by my father.

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