This weekend, as I attempted to tidy to my house, I happened to notice the label inside my boyfriend’s trousers – which he had strewn across the floor of our bedroom.

Upon picking them up, to throw them firmly onto ‘his chair’, (my weekly way of telling him that he needs to put his clothes away), this large white label happened to catch my eye.

As expected, it detailed what temperature the trousers should be washed at. But then, I noticed, stiched in capital letters no less, the usually inoffensive washing instructions tag, offered a rather less appropriate cleaning option: “OR – GIVE IT TO YOUR WOMAN, IT’S HER JOB”.

Now normally I am the type of person who can stomach, and often smile along, with a touch of what has just become known as casual sexist ‘banter’. Having studied politics at university and shared a house with five testosterone-fuelled male students, I was schooled early-on in picking the battles worth fighting and knowing ‘how to take a joke’ – even when it seemed like it was at the expense of my gender.

Usually sexist jibes, statements, or even t-shirt logos, have some kind of juvenile or puerile humour to them. There’s more often than not a slight hint of tongue-in-cheek that allows most women to just pass off the remark or slogan as ‘stupid banter’ – even if they are seething inside. It’s just easier and we know it’s not meant with ‘any real harm’.

However, this crass message stitched onto the label in these cheap chinos from Madhouse, genuinely took me aback.

There was no attempt at wit, and unlike the Topman t-shirts, which offended so many with their brazen slogans to be worn across young men’s chests - this was a hidden message – or rather an order, intended to encourage women to reassume their once their ‘proper place’ (in the home) and young men to maintain the expectations of their grandfathers.

Even the language – ‘Your Woman’ – presupposed some kind of Neanderthal mentality from my boyfriend, an unwilling shopper after some affordable chinos – preferably not lined with sexist imperatives.

When I posted a photo of the humourless trouser label onto Twitter, ironically two days before the 101st International Women’s Day – I had no idea how large the reaction would be.

Suddenly I was inundated with both women and men calling for me to ‘name and shame’ the brand behind such a tasteless stitching.

Hundreds of tweeters were soon expressing their own shock at the washing instruction and letting me know that they would boycott Madhouse – even though the majority of them had never heard of this discounts men’s clothing shop. The subject even started trending on Twitter and then it was picked up by TV and radio stations around the world.

But then, cue the predictable minority chorus of men telling me to “lighten up” and “learn how to take a joke” and the women who love to be ‘one of the boys’ and live in fear of being called a ‘feminist’, informing me of how “hilarious” the message was. One man told me not to “get my knickers in a twist” – which albeit patronising, was at least an attempt at humour.

And yet, that’s just it. If the comment had been remotely funny – I would have been the first to laugh and shrug it off – as it really wouldn’t have bothered me enough to photograph it, tweet it and then write about it. But it was the lack of any implied humour and the horrible surprise of such an incongruous message hidden away inside some trousers, that left me just plain stunned.

We really are in a bad place as a society when laughing something off has become virtually the only response to anything vaguely anti-female, or anti-male for that matter. When football pundit Andy Gray, was sacked by Sky Sports News, and his colleague Richard Keys resigned over their respective sexist remarks last year – there was an enormous pressure for women to laugh their remarks off as ‘lads being lads’ – when that simply just was not the case.

People have also expressed their frustration to me that through highlighting this chauvinist label, I have given Madhouse great publicity and it will financially benefit. Really? It can hardly claim the same brand awareness level as the likes of Topman – plus the company has yet to even respond – or fix its dreadful website – which has been down for at least the last three days. This is a moot point. I don’t think anybody expects hordes of people to specially seek out Madhouse as their shopping destination this weekend.

Some sexist remarks are funny; but some really aren’t. The individuals and brands behind the offensive ones deserve outing and shaming. And just remember – the people pointing out these inappropriate comments can still have a perfectly decent sense of humour.

This article first appeared on The Telegraph on March 6th 2012.

Have you ever thought about what information you are not seeing on the internet every day?

Have you ever considered how your search queries may yield totally different results to your brother, husband or mum?

Last year Eli Pariser delivered a powerful speech at the annual TED conference about the dangers of the ‘filter bubble’, a concept he penned a great book about, and the censorship of information by the internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

“Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out,” he said.

A video of this excellent nine-minute talk has been doing the rounds on the web again this week, after Google was found tracking the web-browsing habits of millions of iPhone users without their consentand was also accused by Microsoft of bypassing its Internet Explorer browser’s privacy protections. Google argues that it is simply making its services work for the millions of users who have signed up for them.

Pariser’s thought-provoking talk has now been watched more than 1.2 million times. In it he warns against the new “unethical” gatekeepers of information in the 21st century: algorithms. Editors used to be the gatekeepers of the flow of information, but in the internet age, algorithms, powering the likes of Google and Facebook, are rapidly gathering information about each of their users, so they can serve them a mixture of content and ‘relevant advertising’.

However, what we think we want to see is not always what we need to see.

Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, once tellingly said: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now that people dying in Africa.”

The internet was meant to set information free; not hand over editorial power to unseen forces serving us the equivalent of junk food news.

Pariser learned, via an unnamed Google engineer, that even if you haven’t logged into Google’s search (which allows a user to specify their content and advertising preferences), there are some 57 signals which the search engine analyses – from what device a person is using to browse the web, to their location – when deciding what information to serve them. The idea is that there is no standard Google anymore.

While we still may be some way away from this vision of truly personalised search, social network feeds and even TV listings, it is definitely the direction in which the flow of information online is going. Pariser calls it the “invisible algorithmic editing of the web”.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, has been quoted as saying: “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

Admittedly the personalisation of some content can be very useful. For instance, if you support a particular football team, naturally you would want to see the latest news about your side first via a search engine or news feed. However, it is important to remember that the majority of the information you don’t know you want to know, is often the most interesting and mind-opening.

This is why, in the age of algorithms and computers, human interaction and editors remain so important. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

This article first appeared in The Telegraph on February 23 2012.

For most of us, our experience on Facebook is a benign – even banal – one. A status update about a colleague’s commute. A “friend” request from someone we haven’t seen for years (and hoped to avoid for several more). A picture of another friend’s baby, barely distinguishable from the dozen posted the day before.

Some four billion pieces of content are shared every day by 845 million users. And while most are harmless, it has recently come to light that the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence – all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour.

In addition to the questionable morality of a company that is about to create 1,000 millionaires when it floats paying such paltry sums, there are significant privacy concerns for the rest of us. Although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users’ personal details. In a week in which there has been an outcry over Google’s privacy policies, can we expect a wider backlash over the extent to which we trust companies with our intimate information?

Last month, 21-year-old Amine Derkaoui gave an interview to Gawker, an American media outlet. Derkaoui had spent three weeks working in Morocco for oDesk, one of the outsourcing companies used by Facebook. His job, for which he claimed he was paid around $1 an hour, involved moderating photos and posts flagged as unsuitable by other users.

“It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,” he told The Daily Telegraph this week. “And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.”

Derkaoui is not exaggerating. An articulate man, he described images of animal abuse, butchered bodies and videos of fights. Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. “Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc,” said one. “I left [because] I value my sanity.” Another compared it to working in a sewer. “All the —- of the world flows towards you and you have to clean it up,” he said.

Who, one wonders, apart from the desperate, the unstable and the unsavoury, would be attracted to doing such an awful job in the first place?

Of course, not all of the unsuitable material on the site is so graphic. Facebook operates a fascinatingly strict set of guidelines determining what should be deleted. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Male nipples are OK, but naked breastfeeding is not. Photographs of bodily fluids (except semen) are allowed, but not if a human being is also shown. Photoshopped images are fine, but not if they show someone in a negative light.

Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California (who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities). Moderators are told always to escalate specific threats – “I’m going to stab Lisa H at the frat party” is given as the charming example – but not generic, unlikely ones, such as “I’m going to blow up the planet on New Year’s Eve.”

It is, of course, to Facebook’s credit that they are attempting to balance their mission “to make the world more open and connected” with a willingness to remove traces of the darker side of human nature. The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard bedroom is richer and more populated than many countries. These moderators are their police.

Neither is Facebook alone in outsourcing unpleasant work. Adam Levin, the US-based chief executive of Criterion Capital Partners and the owner of British social network Bebo, says that the process is “rampant” across Silicon Valley.

“We do it at Bebo,” he says. “Facebook has so much content flowing into its system every day that it needs hundreds of people moderating all the images and posts which are flagged. That type of workforce is best outsourced for speed, scale and cost.”

A spokesman for Twitter said that they have an internal moderation team, but refused to answer a question about outsourcing. Similarly, a Google spokesperson would not say how Google+, the search giant’s new social network, will be moderated. Neither Facebook nor oDesk were willing to comment on anything to do with outsourcing or moderation.

Levin, however, estimates that Facebook indirectly employs between 800 to 1,000 moderators via oDesk and others – nearly a third of its more handsomely remunerated full-time staff. Graham Cluley, of the internet security firm Sophos, calls Silicon Valley’s outsourcing culture its “poorly kept dirty secret”.

The biggest worry for the rest of us, however, is that the moderation process isn’t nearly secretive enough. According to Derkaoui, there are no security measures on a moderator’s computer to stop them uploading obscene material themselves. Despite coming into daily contact with such material, he was never subjected to a criminal record check. Where, then, is the oversight body for these underpaid global police? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Facebook itself is guarding them, according to a previous statement to which the Telegraph was referred. “These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service,” it read. “No user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared. All decisions made by contractors are subject to extensive audits.”

And yet in the images due for moderation seen by the Telegraph, the name of anyone “tagged” in an offending post – as well as the user who uploaded it – could be clearly discerned. A Facebook spokesman said that these names are shared with the moderators to put the content in context – a context sufficient for Derkaoui to claim that he had as much information as “looking at a friend’s Facebook page”. He admits to having subsequently looked up more information online about the people he had been moderating. Cluley is worried that Facebook users could be blackmailed by disgruntled moderators – or even see pictures originally intended for a small circle of friends pasted all over the web.

Shamoon Siddiqui, chief executive of Develop.io, an American app-building firm that employs people in the developing world for a more generous $7 to $10 an hour, agrees that better security measures are needed. “It isn’t wrong for Facebook to have an Indian office,” he says. “But it is wrong for it to use an arbitrary marketplace with random people it doesn’t know in that country. This will have to change.”

In Britain, for example, all web moderators have to undergo an enhanced CRB check. eModeration, whose clients range from HSBC to The X-Factor, pays £10 an hour and never lets its staff spend too long on the gritty stuff. They wouldn’t go near the Facebook account. The job, says Tamara Littleton, its chief executive, is too big, the moderating too reactive, and they couldn’t compete on cost with the likes of oDesk.

So, if no one can undercut the likes of oDesk, could they not be undermined instead? If Mr Zuckerberg will not dig deeper into his $17.5 billion pockets to pay the street-sweepers of Facebook properly, maybe he could be persuaded by a little moral outrage?

Levin disagrees. “Perhaps a minute percentage of users will stop using Facebook when they hear about this,” he says. “But the more digital our society becomes, the less people value their privacy.”

Perhaps. But maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their “friends” – only to find that two minutes later it’s being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.