The life of a censor is not easy.

Pity the poor Facebook/Twitter/YouTube censor.

For the first few months, Rob didn’t mind his job moderating videos at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno. His coworkers were mostly new graduates like himself, many of them liberal arts majors.... But as months dragged on, the rough stuff began to take a toll. The worst was the gore: brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents...

“If someone was uploading animal abuse, a lot of the time it was the person who did it. He was proud of that,” Rob says. “And seeing it from the eyes of someone who was proud to do the fucked-up thing, rather than news reporting on the fucked-up thing—it just hurts you so much harder, for some reason. It just gives you a much darker view of humanity.”

Rob began to dwell on the videos outside of work. He became withdrawn and testy....

It became clear to Rob that he would likely never become a real Google employee. A few months into his contract, he applied for a job with Google but says he was turned down for an interview because his GPA didn’t meet the requirement....

Some unknown portion of the pain is knowing your career is going nowhere. There's the dead man in the video... and the dead end that is your career. And there's a troubling discrepancy between the kind of pain that is in your life personally as you sit comfortably and unharmed in your chair and the immense pain of others you see on the screen. The dissonance adds to the burden of your personal pain.