Who watches the Web: Portal is hiring censors

JEJU ― At the Daum Clean Center in downtown Jeju, the sound of clicking never stops. As if snipping out tumors with surgical scissors, 126 employees scour the Daum portal Web site for “bad” content and delete it with a mouse click.
Operating around the clock in three shifts of 42 each, these cyber censors target adult videos, copyright-sensitive videos, and offensive and abusive language in text posts.
The monitors have a special program running on their computers, and sit in partitioned cubicles like telephone operators. The software, called “X Keeper,” helps the screeners look at six random still shots from videos, which are all less than 10 minutes long. If they see any suspicious content or suggestive titles, they look through the entire clip to determine whether or not the video is appropriate for the site. This particular monitoring service is run by Daum Service, an affiliate of Daum Communications established just three months ago.
About 10,000 videos are posted every day on the Daum video portal service “tv pot,” and of them, about 200 to 300 are deleted. “Between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. I went through about 1,770 clips and deleted nine”, said Hyun Won-il, a monitoring agent.
Portal companies are increasingly troubled by inappropriate videos as the Web becomes a video medium. Yahoo! Korea was criticized for a porn video that was posted for a few hours on its front page before it was deleted, and all the portals have taken flak for not monitoring such material on a more timely basis.
Other Daum monitors scour the Web for abusive text, also assisted by a software tool that scans the portal for certain keywords. The agents police public discussion boards and forums, but not private communities.
“About 2,000 comments are left in discussion rooms, and some contain irrelevant content with bad language, which we delete. They amount to about 4 to 5 percent of all comments,” said Kim Sun-hwa, one of the monitors.
Machines and people work together to sift through the massive quantity of information online. The “bad content” that is missed by the human eye appears on screens on the wall, flashing red.
Due the high volume of content and Daum’s plan to expand its video service, the Clean Center plans to increase its staff to 1,000 over the next two years.
“We are also going to develop more precise programs in addition to increasing our manual workforce,” said Kim Cheol, head of Daum Service. “Of course, deleting bad content is not the solution. We have to raise awareness among users about posting such content.”

By Wohn Dong-hee Staff Writer [wohn@joongang.co.kr]