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Snapchat Has a Child-Porn Problem
- jrs95 9y agoCould easily substitute Snapchat with Facebook, Instagram, any cell provider, etc. I don't see how this really ought to be news.
- pwinnski 9y agoOn the contrary, the exploitation of children ought to be news every day that it's a problem. Snapchat is the focus here because it's better-suited to exploitation than the others you name as part of its design and marketing. But yes, there are also clearly issues outside of Snapchat as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 9y agoYeah the whole, "Everybody does it" minimizing argument isn't really valid here.
- mcgarnagle 9y agoI don't think it was an argument for the distribution of those photos. It was merely pointing out that punishing snapchat does not solve a societal problem. Instead you need to keep tracing this bug in the code of society and fix the root problem.
- tcd 9y agoHow do you propose fixing the problem? Not giving teens/kids smartphones is a sensible start, but that's not realistic, and they don't have the awareness (or the logical thing that screams "don't do this") developed yet. They're not technically aware of how the internet works (caches, archives, downloading media) and that images can stick around forever. people think snapchat images are 'deleted', yet that's not actually true, and can be intercepted/recorded anyway.
- spike021 9y ago>Not giving teens/kids smartphones is a sensible start, but that's not realistic I don't know, I got by just fine with a dumbphone through high school (beginning of the iPhone era). I don't think most teens need smartphones, honestly. But we've crossed the point where that matters.
- jrs95 9y agoEven dumbphones can do MMS, though.
- ashark 9y agoNo MMS without a data plan. Unless something's changed.
- spike021 9y agoyep, this, at least when I was at that age.
- vthriller 9y agoAnd in schools in my area J2ME-capable phone were actually so ubiquitous I already was a heavy user of things like Opera Mini, BombusMod (Jabber client), and MidpSSH—all that a decade ago, when prices were given for each megabyte of data transfer. But that was me, others were just sharing music and pictures through Bluetooth amongst themselves most of the time.
- davisdude 9y ago> I don't think most teens need smartphones, honestly. In today's schools, some teachers plan activities where students use their smart phones for specific projects, so this is becoming increasingly harder to do.
- spike021 9y agothat's utterly ridiculous. what about students who can't afford smartphones?
- totalZero 9y agoWait, so is the point that nobody should have security because a few people commit crimes under its cover?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 9y agoPhotographic chat application aimed at teens has teens putting up nude photographs. Anonymous person claiming to be not a dog turns out to be a dog. Say it isn't so!
- rock_hard 9y agoI guess that depends on the definition of child porn! I personally don’t think teenagers sending nudes to each other classifies at such
- Sean1708 9y agoThat's not even slightly what the article is about...
- jjjensen90 9y agoIt may not be what the article is specifically about, but I'm willing to bet that a large majority of the "child porn" on services like SC are teen to teen, and in fact teens are being convicted as sex offenders for taking pictures of themselves.
- Aloha 9y agoWhats weird to me is the meeting point of where sex between two people is legal, but them taking pictures of each other naked is a felony.. there is a lack of common sense being applied here.
- jjjensen90 9y agoRight, age of consent is 16 in most of the US, so you could meet up and do all sorts of things, but if you take a picture of your consensual sex you are a felon. Hmmmmmm...
- tcd 9y agoThe law makes sense though from one perspective, as silly as this sounds. Having sex is far less worse than a video/picture of you naked, which may exist on the internet for a very, very long time. Think Amanda Todd and it being used as blackmail; the added threat of it being child porn is a real turn off. Of course you then wonder how much can change in just 2 years, but if you're legally an adult, and you consented to the image, it won't be classed as child porn, but revenge porn laws are a thing. But the easiest solution is not to consent to being filmed/photographed if you don't want to be...With how google photos uploads automatically the second you take a picture I don't trust smartphones these days...
- air7 9y agoThis page loaded with an auto-starting, non-stoppable, not-mutable video... That's a new bottom mark for me.
- Danihan 9y agoBloomberg has a revenue problem.
- Zpalmtree 9y agoIs there anyone who wants to actually be bombarded by this crap? It's so obnoxious. If I wanted to watch TV I'd turn the damn thing on.
- Const-me 9y agoThat's why I prefer MS keyboards with extra multimedia buttons: with a mute key on the keyboard, everything is mutable.
- lightbyte 9y agoFor what it's worth, you can stop it. Right click -> show controls -> pause button. It is pretty terrible that you need to actively do this to stop it though.
- jerrycruncher 9y agoFWIW you can disable the autoplay of all media, including animated gifs, in FF by going to about:config and setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.
- Derbasti 9y agoStop saying child porn. You are talking about documented abuse of children. Not porn.
- morowind 9y agoAlso distinguish between the willful use of parent-approved devices by teenagers old enough to know what is acceptable behavior in a public space (whether perception of the internet as a conceptually public place is clear or not) and photographic evidence of abuse of a minor (statutory or otherwise).
- jack1243star 9y agoOn one hand I agree with you, as pedophiles are too often seen as child molesters. On the other hand there are people who consider those as porn. Pornographic content is simply impossible to classify.
- top256 9y agoEven though this story is horrible, it reminds me of a silicon valley episode https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/1/15504692/hbo-silicon-valley-season-4-episode-2-terms-of-service-recap https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/1/15504692/hbo-silicon-valle... Are they prescient or does things never change?
- mcgarnagle 9y agodo you have to be prescient in order for common sense dots to be connected?
- hosh 9y agoI don't think this is precience, though I often find many authors and artists to speak up for stuff repressed in our collective subconscious. This kind of stuff is becoming increasingly more difficult to bury, and it is the kind of stuff our civilization has never adequately addressed. I think it can be changed, but not if we keep trying to bury it.
- stevew20 9y agoBurn the witches! Down with flikr and pintrest while you're at it!
- trhway 9y agoAI filter trained to recognize such images can theoretically help here. Kind of catch-22 though here as training of such AI isn't practically possible (except by specially assigned/cleared FBI agents on the FBI database of child porn). Even if trained, deployment of such a neural net would also be problematic as the kernels in the deep layers would bear some resemblance to the parts of images it was trained to identify. Though there are seems to be a kind of some partial solution here, and i wonder why Snapchat still seems to not have it - train 2 nets, one to recognize porn/erotica using completely legal adult images, and train another net to recognize young adults and children vs. adults on legal completely innocent images. While obviously not catching all illegal images, both nets producing positive signal may probably catch significant share of illegal images.
- drraid0 9y agoSnap should hire Craig Newmark. He was able to get away with pimping prostitutes on his site for a decade+.
- throwaway0255 9y agoYou guys can defend Snap all you want, but the fact is there is no single company on the planet or at any point in human history that has benefitted from child pornography more than Snap has. They became popular as the “exploding image” app. The primary consumer use case for this is transmitting nude photos. Their valuation is due in large part to the youth of their demographic (younger users than just about any social app). I don’t think it’s a stretch to say they probably owe most of their success to solving the problem of the consequences associated with sending nudes online for people in junior high and high school (or at least, these people think it’s solving that problem for them). Comparing Snap to email or texts on this issue is a false equivalency. Snap is specifically intended for this, and owes a ton of their valuation to children using it and spreading it for this purpose.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]