Id like to preface, I'm not trying to reduce what these people are going through.

But it's relative.

I grew up on farms, I've slaughtered animals and I've seen seemingly stable 30 year olds completely break down when they see a video of an animal being humanely slaughtered.

I've also heard stories from mates of mine in the military that I'd prefer not to see on video.

People are desensitised from things they are raised with. Some shit (kiddie porn and extremely graphic BDSM and rape), isn't something you really want people to be able to accept.

Knowing that it's something that really happened vs a movie is a big difference.

The job is to view an endless parade of the most creatively horrible things people have ever said to each other or captured on film, all day every day.

The job itself requires you to actually scrutinize the details-- averting your eyes is not an option. The job is to look at and mentally process each artifact.

Violence in our origins at least had a point. Kill for survival. Kill for food. Killing meant something.

Raping children never served any biological purpose, nor does watching actual people explode. There are many reasons we try to make the world such that neither is a part of anybody's life.

(ed) Put it this way-- if it's so harmless for people to be exposed to, why moderate anything at all?

> I find hard to believe humans are so sensitive [...]

Perhaps that says more about you than about humanity.

There's two very good reasons why cops use checksums instead of watching child pornography.

1) It goes faster (on the long term once the scripts/programs are written).

2) Its mentally exhaustive to check such footage. Why? One word: empathy.

Also, why is it that cops become so tense, or racist? Because of what they experienced. If your experience is shooting someone for the first time in your life, yielding a kill, then that is going to have a severe impact on you. If its #81, then its just a statistic.

Human brains are very adaptive. Consider the following scenario: A person is standing on a stage, in front of many of their peers, giving a speech or receiving an award or some other public recognition. Someone comes up behind them and swiftly pantses them, dropping their pants and underwear instantly, exposing them nude from the waist down. Would you expect this event to result in psychological trauma to the person? The answer depends entirely and completely upon that persons prior experience. If the person has been raised as a nudist, and spent a great deal of time in their life nude in the presence of strangers, it would be a non-event on the level of sneezing. If the person has been raised the way most individuals in our society are raised, with tremendous social scorn and shame heaped upon every topic related to the body, with zero experience of being naked or witnessing nudity in a public setting... it could be monumentally traumatic and cause them intense psychological harm that lingers for decades. When society was familiar with violence, violence had less of an effect because of that. Now that violence is very rare, and we repeatedly insist to one another that things on a screen are basically the same as the things themselves (which we do with our language we use when talking about fictional depictions, using instead the words that would be more correct only if we were describing real in-person situations), we sensitize ourselves and invent the possibility of these images destroying us psychologically. It is a self-imposed weakness, but one which intellectual recognition of can do almost nothing to remove.

> We evolved in an environment where violence was part of real life and a real threat to our own well being

It's beneficial for survival to have some strong reaction on observing violence. Could be "charge", "run for your life", or something else, but it was never "click a mouse button and move on to the next violence scene". Similar for gore, evolutionary correct reaction is "run and/or vomit".

People who failed to react in a strong way did not pass genes: joined the violence scene they observed, caught the same decease and joined the gore scene they observed.

It's well known that viewing graphic material can trigger PTSD, e.g. in the police force. These moderators will be exposed to similar.

>We evolved in an environment where violence was part . . .

We also evolved in an environment without screens, that is, a world without any selection pressure to distinguish between actually dangerous experiences and experiences generated by screens.

When I worked at Y! groups a couple times legal would ask us to remove images. I am about as insensitive as it gets but a few images of babies being molested will trigger some deep emotions.

I cant imagine doing that day in and day out.