There may or may not be a method to this madness.

unpretty:

oorpe:

unpretty:

obviously i saw a lot of fucked up shit doing youtube content moderation but a thing that stuck with me was titty minnie

it was a whole subgenre of shittily-animated flash-tier videos where knockoff minnie mouse had big titties and lost her clothes to misadventure in a totally wordless video. sometimes she was pregnant and knockoff mickey was cheating on her. sometimes i would think i was about to watch a normal bootleg disney video, because minnie almost looked on-model, only for her to suddenly inflate into an orb with huge bare feet and lovingly-rendered toes.

anyway. all the combined power of disney and google was not enough to get rid of titty minnie. every day as i went through my queue of hundreds of videos, there would be a new titty minnie video using a different animation style from a different channel using different keywords. they would rack up so many views before we caught them thanks to autoplay. i checked in an incognito tab to see if they’ve managed to get rid of titty minnie yet and they have not. she’s still out there, getting her bikini cut off at the beach and giving birth in her living room.

Jesus christ, the thought had never crossed my mind but seems obvious now, of course it has to be moderated somehow. 

my job wasn’t even content moderation in the traditional sense–i was just supposed to flag content that advertisers might not like. i could add a note like “hey i don’t think this should be on youtube, at all, whatsoever” but that wasn’t actually my job. all i was really supposed to do was hit the checkbox for ‘violence’ or 'controversial’ or 'inappropriate language’ (or one of the twentyish other approved flags we had). i couldn’t actually delete anything, i could just hit the 'violent content’ flag and add a note saying, “this is a video of a child being abused and not only should it not be on youtube but someone should contact the authorities” while hoping for the best.