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Sex
May 05, 2009, 07:18AM

Facebook's Porn Patrol

They're here to clean up your act. Put away the side boob, ladies.

At Facebook, Axten isn't some fringe employee doing unmentionable work. 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. "[They were] essentially shanghaied by pornography and sexual displays," says David Kirkpatrick, author of the forthcoming book "The Facebook Effect." It's a tricky job: by insisting that users sign up under real names and refrain from posting R-rated photos, Facebook hopes to widen its user base to include upscale professionals, but at the same time it's aware that too much heavy-handed censorship could upset its existing members. "If [Facebook] got polluted as just a place for wild and crazy kids, that would destroy the ability to achieve the ultimate vision, which is to create a service for literally everyone," Kirkpatrick says—and then its potential for profits would disappear, too.Internet companies have long grappled with illicit postings. As far back as 1993, AOL's "community action teams" were reviewing e-mail and chat-room activity. Craigslist has long been beset by ads for prostitution; in November, the site began cooperating with attorneys general to curb posts to its "Erotic Services" section, and last month Boston police apprehended a med-school student later charged with murdering a woman who'd placed a "massage services" ad on the site. In 2005, as user-generated content platforms exploded at sites like YouTube, Flickr and Digg, the need to screen content grew rapidly as well, increasing demand for online cops.

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