I watch surgery videos sometimes, out of fascination. It's not gore to me - sure it's flesh and blood but there is a person whose life is going to be probably significantly better afterwards. They are also not in pain.

I exposed myself to actual gore vids in the aughts and teens... That stuff still sticks with me in a bad way.

Context matters a lot.

> They are also not in pain.

My understanding is that during surgery, your body is most definitely in pain. Your body still reacts as it would to any damage, but anesthetics block the pain signals from reaching the brain.

But there is a difference between someone making an effort healing someone else vs content with implications that something really disturbing happened that makes you lose faith in humanity.

I agree. But that might be comorbid with PTSD. It’s probably not good for you to be _that_ desensitised to this sort of thing.

I also feel like there’s something intangible regarding intent that makes moderation different from being a doctor. It’s hard for me to put into words, but doctors see gore because they can hopefully do something to help the individual involved. Moderators see gore but are powerless to help the individual, they can only prevent others from seeing the gore.

It's also the type of gore that matters. Some of the worst stuff I've seen wasn't the worst because of the visuals, but because of the audio. Hearing people begging for their life while being executed surely would feel different to even a surgeon who might be used to digging around in people's bodies.

There are many common situations where professionals are helpless, like people that needs to clean up dead bodies after an accident.

Imagine if this becomes a specialized, remote job where one tele-operates the brain and blood scrubbing robot all workday long, accident, after accident after accident. I am sure they'd get PTSD too, airey, sometime it's just oil and coolant, but there's still a lot of body-tissue involved.

I'd really like to see more data on this. I really think (most) people would be desensitized and not become hyper sensitive to this content.

Another fascet to this is the moderators willfully agreed to review this content and had full autonomy to leave the job at any point.

I'm sure they consented to taking the job but is it informed consent? Can you really know what you will be exposed to? And unless unemployment insurance is given to quitters, autonomy to leave a job at any point is overestimated... Sure you can decide if you want to leave but how long it takes may not be in everyone's control if they first need to find another job.

Desensitization is only one stage of it. It's not permanent & requires dissociation from reality/humanity on some level. But that stuff is likely to come back and haunt one in some way. If not, it's likely a symptom of something deeper going on.

My guess is that's why it's after bulldozing hundreds of Palestinians, instead of 1 or 10s of them, that Israeli soldiers report PTSD.

If you haven't watched enough videos of the ongoing genocides in the world to realize this, it'll be a challenge to have a realistic take on this article.