Comment Moderator, the Dirtiest Job on the Internet

Illustration by Christina Ung

By David Sax

In a cabana in Progreso, Mexico, overlooking the blue waters of the Gulf, Canadian Chuck Dueck cracks open his laptop and logs into the comment forums of several news websites. Over at cbc.ca, home to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., an article on child obesity has drawn this gem, “It is VERY simple. People who are FAT eat too much. There were no fat Jews in Auschwitz—they did not have much food. Stop eating so much!” At npr.org, one comment is directed specifically at Dueck. “GO F- -K YOUR SELF A- -HOLE, You are making me hate this site!!! F-G!”

One by one, Dueck, a professional online moderator, deletes these comments, scolds the people behind them (either on the forum or over e-mail), and, if things really get out of hand—say, in the case of repeat offenders—bans their accounts. Over the course of each day he chips away at the cussing and swearing, the spammers, haters, and trolls, temporarily restoring civility to his corner of the Internet.

Since the first messages were posted on bulletin boards some three decades back, comments and free discussion between anonymous users have been a central part of the Internet’s appeal. Sites such as Gawker and the Huffington Post built their empires on page clicks driven by endless streams of commenters and flame wars. But what’s good for Gawker isn’t always great for established brands, and as companies have embraced the Web and eagerly interacted with their customers, they’ve often been overwhelmed by the response. A lethal combination of anonymity, opinion, and the safety of typing from a remote location all but guarantees that comment forums get out of hand, falling prey to the Hobbesian tirades of the Web’s most nasty, brutish, and vocal denizens—hence, the increasing need for moderators such as Dueck to intervene and sanitize sites’ comment boards.

Dueck works for ICUC Moderation, the brainchild of Winnipeg businessman Keith Bilous, which started out in 2002 as Captain Interactive, broadcasting text messages onto nightclub screens (after vetting the content). Today, ICUC employs over 200 moderators globally and was acquired in June by London’s Aegis Group (though Bilous, like all his employees, still works from home). The company claims $10 million in revenue last year, cleaning up the comments on the websites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages of blue-chip brands such as Chevron, Starbucks, and the Boston Globe. “Some Fridays you feel like you need to spend two hours in the shower because it’s so disgusting,” says Bilous.

“We see the dark underbelly of the world,” says Tamara Littleton, the CEO of London-based eModeration, a 160-person community management firm with $7 million in revenue whose clients include MTV, the Economist, and ESPN. The firm has doubled in size each year since it began in 2002 (also as a text-to-screen nightclub gimmick), and charges clients anywhere from $4,000 to $50,000 a month for moderation. “It used to be a lot about keeping things clean, safe, and legal for brands. All they wanted was people not to say horrible things,” says Littleton. “Now it’s about engagement…. Now you want to manage Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.” She notes that while the social networks don’t allow for anonymity in comments, they’ve increased her company’s workload tremendously, as consumers demand instant responses from brands online. Littleton cites an incident last year when Nestle PR people tried to stifle criticism from Greenpeace on their Facebook page, which was not professionally moderated. The event unleashed a torrent of comments and resulted in a PR disaster. In such cases, eModeration’s team might have defused the situation before it blew up.

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