Making The World Safe For Facebook

Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the tit shift

Is there anything drearier than a young prude?

Yes, a professional young prude:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850. Facebook describes these staffers as an internal police force, charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. Part hall monitors, part vice cops, these employees are key weapons in Facebook's efforts to maintain its image as a place that's safe for corporate advertisers—more so than predecessor social networks like Friendster and MySpace. 

That's Newsweek in "Walking The Cyberbeat" lauding Facebook's "porn cops," the crew seen above, as they go about their work days with lips pursed and mouse hand poised, making the deletions that will keep the social networking site safe for corporate advertising. For performing this Winston Smith-meets-Ruth Buzzi work, these recent grads do OK:

Behind all these actions is a team of employees who set guidelines and make judgment calls, each earning in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year—making "porn cop" one of the quirkier entry-level jobs to emerge in the Silicon Valley economy. 

"Quirkier"-- when did that come to mean more pathetic?  Sure, it's a lousy economy, you take what you can get.  What a waste of minds, let alone seats in colleges, though, if we're sending people to school only in order to train tomorrow's areola hunters. The only more depressing example I've heard recently is a friend's friend's kid getting a job through the Obama gravy train. Idealistic campaign worker, change you can believe in, making history, etc. He's now riveting together Homeland Security press releases. Given the choice between Facebook and the vee-haf-ways people, I'd probably rather click the OBSCENE button all day long.

Maybe these folks hate their jobs, maybe they love them, who knows? Newsweek's too busy making it sound like derring-do to ask anyone; not that the answer is likely to be, "Yes, when I removed the shot of that guy in the chaps with an ass like the lid of the Popemobile, I knew this was why I studied history." Clicking through naughty Facebook pages admittedly beats what I did at their age. When the economy sucked in the 80s and I had yet to cobble up enough credits to graduate, I sold shoes. Millionaire TV news bimbos, banker-slavers, pampered athletes and Saint Paul's coked-up scandahoovian elite stuck out their dogs for the cool embrace of a Cole Haun, which I obligingly squirmed onto their toesy woesies in the usual sad bid for commission. Tennessee Williams, who also sold shoes for a spell and decided those years didn't count, would later subtract the time when giving his age.

How can this tit-nitpicking be economical? Facebook has yet to earn a cent. Not that I'm trying to downsize anyone, but really, people do this kind of thing for free. Ask any librarian. $50K to censor seems like dear pay for work that has been done down the ages, from Milton's era to ours, by simpletons, busybodies, bitter pensioners, seething mobs, vituperative churchmen and so on, with remuneration only the flames in their eyes and a happy clenching in the bowels. It's a vast dishonorable tradition. Facebook's clueless. Out there, beyond the darkness on the edge of town, is a congress of sere and vengeful fogies who'd gladly devote their every free minute as canaries in the coal mines of exposed flesh.

Yes, I know it's called Facebook and not Arsebook. So? Why glamorize a grubby gig? Half the trouble here is Newsweek being so approving, so panting, in its usual conceit of having located the cutting edge.  (News magazine trend-hopping can be a millstone of embarrassment. Back in those heady post-9-11 days, Newsweek's resident fuckwit Jonathan Alter got excited about torture, declaring himself all manned-up and ready at last to think the unthinkable.*  That sure worked out well.)  But today in newsmagazine land, the edge only gets blunter as the readers thin out along with the ad pages. There's desperation for anything that can bring the audience back. Maybe that's why the article has the anti-porn posse posing like a TV crime-show cast, unless they've all watched so much CSI that the pack-of-uptight-dicks look just comes naturally.

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* His pro-torture piece ran the very same week FOX's 24 debuted; Alter, you might say, cut Jack Bauer's umbilical cord.