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This "sex censorship" includes child pornography, since the availability of it caused Tumblr's app to be banned from iOS.[0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/

This "sex censorship" includes child pornography, since the availability of it caused Tumblr's app to be banned from iOS.[0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-child-pornography-removed-from-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...

At1C 8y ago
Bullshit
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  You're not wrong, but you need to substantiate or fill out your claim.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
nemothekid 8y ago
I really find that the child pornography angle was a convenient lie to push through the banning of porn on tumblr. It's my view that Verizon didn't want it, so it had to go away. Child pornography online isn't a new problem and Tumblr must have been negligent in policing it.
- dgzl 8y ago
  Or maybe they don't want to subject their employees to having to police child pornography.
  - balt_s 8y ago
    Oh please, so they're suddenly far more moral than snap/insta/insert-photo-share-site-here? What an absurd reach
    - dgzl 8y ago
      The absurd reach is pretending that a company shouldn't take every measure possible in preventing its platform from hosting some of the most abusive and criminal content on the planet. What makes you think they're not more moral than the other platforms? What makes you think this has anything to do with morality at all?
      - BethGagaShaggy 8y ago
        I agree. I too think that the internet shouldn't exist.
        dgzl 8y ago
        I seriously don't understand what connection you're trying to make. It might help if you were less sarcastic and more straight forward.
        renholder 8y ago
        >...shouldn't take every measure possible in preventing its platform from hosting some of the most abusive and criminal content on the planet. If you want to genuinely prevent the most abusive and criminal content on the planet, then - as the comment you're replying to suggests - the only sure way to prevent it is to not allow it to be hosted/connected to/shared/etc. anwyhere across the internet but since you can't ensure that, then we default tothe internet being the medium that makes that possible/happen, so...
  - rhizome 8y ago
    You mean they didn't want to pay enough for people to want to police it.
    - dgzl 8y ago
      No, that's not what I mean.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      In Comments Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. ... Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    ...child pornography was previously banned (duh), and it's still banned (duh). Their employees still need to moderate their platform and ensure there's no child porn. Banning regular, legal porn has zero bearing on this.
    - dgzl 8y ago
      I imagine it would take careful and meticulous observation to differentiate between legal porn and almost-legal porn. Dissolving the platform of porn entirely would streamline this process and potentially be automated. Banning regular porn has a greater than zero bearing on moderating child porn, and you're being disingenuous in pretending otherwise.
      - chimeracoder 8y ago
        > I imagine it would take careful and meticulous observation to differentiate between legal porn and almost-legal porn. Dissolving the platform of porn entirely would streamline this process and potentially be automated. Banning regular porn has a greater than zero bearing on moderating child porn, and you're being disingenuous in pretending otherwise. Why do people keep repeating this? No, it's much more difficult to ban all pornography than it is to ban only child porn. One requires analyzing the content of photos and the other doesn't.
        dgzl 8y ago
        > No, it's much more difficult to ban all pornography than it is to ban only child porn. One requires analyzing the content of photos and the other doesn't. Since it's easier to spot pornography in general than differentiate between very disturbing types of pornography, the work load is lessened and overall less stressful. Not to mention the amount of work ai could automate. That's your point, right?
        chimeracoder 8y ago
        > Since it's easier to spot pornography in general than differentiate between very disturbing types of pornography, the work load is lessened and overall less stressful. Not to mention the amount of work ai could automate. That's your point, right? No, detecting child pornography by matching photos to known datasets and then extrapolating rings dedicated to sharing child porn from the social graph is already a solved problem. NCMEC already provides the tools to do this. You don't need to do any image analysis. There are no effective tools for detecting porn more generally. That's a much harder problem.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    What about violence? What about torture photos? Child porn is just part of objectable content, and content that is illegal in many jurisdictions in the markets they serve. You still need people to review that, even if only as part of the the appeals process.
  - nemothekid 8y ago
    Then they should shut down Tumblr. Every platform that generates UGC has to police their platform to remove child pornography, full stop. If they don't want to moderate their platform, then they should shut the whole thing down. They have to "subject their employees to having to police child pornography" regardless of the fact that they host legal pornography. Twitter has plenty of legal porn without butting heads with this issue. Facebook doesn't allow porn and have to deal with the child pornography issue. Taking the stance of "we banned all porn because of child porn" is lazy and deflects responsibility and agency of their actions. They banned porn because the suits higher up said they didn't like it, full stop. Trying to save face with the community and blame child porn is dishonest when every platform, from 4chan to Facebook, has to police and report child porn.
- jrnichols 8y ago
  I don't believe it was a convenient lie. I personally reported A LOT of posts and entire blogs for very very very obviously inappropriate underage content, yet they still remained. Tumblr was quickly becoming a cesspool they couldn't clean.
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    Every photo site since the beginning of user uploads has had this problem. This isn’t an issue if you decide to invest the resources into fixing it. That means hire people to look at photos. It means hooking in to the NCMEC / FBI’s database of known hashes. It’s buying (not even building) a content filter. These things exist. Tumblr decided not to bother, which forced them to panic and nuke the site from orbit. It’s a mess of their own making.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > Every photo site since the beginning of user uploads has had this problem. This isn’t an issue if you decide to invest the resources into fixing it. That means hire people to look at photos. It means hooking in to the NCMEC / FBI’s database of known hashes. It’s buying (not even building) a content filter. These things exist. Tumblr decided not to bother, which forced them to panic and nuke the site from orbit. Tumblr had an entire team that did literally all of those things, for years. They did not "decide not to bother".
      - jonathankoren 8y ago
        Did they really bother though? I mean, I’m sure they have people employed, but something is seriously mismanaged. How did they let it get so bad? This should have never gotten to the point that another company had to say, “WTF is with all the child porn?” Saying you have team working on something, but not giving them appropriate resources, not taking the problem seriously, is same as not bothering. It’s same as saying, “We take your concerns seriously”, and then throwing the complaint in the trash. Their actions betray they’re true feelings.
fwip 8y ago
Unofficial rumors from tumblr staff say that the porn ban was already in the pipeline; the iOS ban just sped the timeline up by a month or two.

At1C 8y ago

Bullshit

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
You're not wrong, but you need to substantiate or fill out your claim.
dang 8y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

nemothekid 8y ago

I really find that the child pornography angle was a convenient lie to push through the banning of porn on tumblr. It's my view that Verizon didn't want it, so it had to go away. Child pornography online isn't a new problem and Tumblr must have been negligent in policing it.

dgzl 8y ago
Or maybe they don't want to subject their employees to having to police child pornography.
- balt_s 8y ago
  Oh please, so they're suddenly far more moral than snap/insta/insert-photo-share-site-here? What an absurd reach
  - dgzl 8y ago
    The absurd reach is pretending that a company shouldn't take every measure possible in preventing its platform from hosting some of the most abusive and criminal content on the planet. What makes you think they're not more moral than the other platforms? What makes you think this has anything to do with morality at all?
    - BethGagaShaggy 8y ago
      I agree. I too think that the internet shouldn't exist.
      - dgzl 8y ago
        I seriously don't understand what connection you're trying to make. It might help if you were less sarcastic and more straight forward.
        renholder 8y ago
        >...shouldn't take every measure possible in preventing its platform from hosting some of the most abusive and criminal content on the planet. If you want to genuinely prevent the most abusive and criminal content on the planet, then - as the comment you're replying to suggests - the only sure way to prevent it is to not allow it to be hosted/connected to/shared/etc. anwyhere across the internet but since you can't ensure that, then we default tothe internet being the medium that makes that possible/happen, so...
- rhizome 8y ago
  You mean they didn't want to pay enough for people to want to police it.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    No, that's not what I mean.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    In Comments Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. ... Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  ...child pornography was previously banned (duh), and it's still banned (duh). Their employees still need to moderate their platform and ensure there's no child porn. Banning regular, legal porn has zero bearing on this.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    I imagine it would take careful and meticulous observation to differentiate between legal porn and almost-legal porn. Dissolving the platform of porn entirely would streamline this process and potentially be automated. Banning regular porn has a greater than zero bearing on moderating child porn, and you're being disingenuous in pretending otherwise.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > I imagine it would take careful and meticulous observation to differentiate between legal porn and almost-legal porn. Dissolving the platform of porn entirely would streamline this process and potentially be automated. Banning regular porn has a greater than zero bearing on moderating child porn, and you're being disingenuous in pretending otherwise. Why do people keep repeating this? No, it's much more difficult to ban all pornography than it is to ban only child porn. One requires analyzing the content of photos and the other doesn't.
      - dgzl 8y ago
        > No, it's much more difficult to ban all pornography than it is to ban only child porn. One requires analyzing the content of photos and the other doesn't. Since it's easier to spot pornography in general than differentiate between very disturbing types of pornography, the work load is lessened and overall less stressful. Not to mention the amount of work ai could automate. That's your point, right?
        chimeracoder 8y ago
        > Since it's easier to spot pornography in general than differentiate between very disturbing types of pornography, the work load is lessened and overall less stressful. Not to mention the amount of work ai could automate. That's your point, right? No, detecting child pornography by matching photos to known datasets and then extrapolating rings dedicated to sharing child porn from the social graph is already a solved problem. NCMEC already provides the tools to do this. You don't need to do any image analysis. There are no effective tools for detecting porn more generally. That's a much harder problem.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  What about violence? What about torture photos? Child porn is just part of objectable content, and content that is illegal in many jurisdictions in the markets they serve. You still need people to review that, even if only as part of the the appeals process.
- nemothekid 8y ago
  Then they should shut down Tumblr. Every platform that generates UGC has to police their platform to remove child pornography, full stop. If they don't want to moderate their platform, then they should shut the whole thing down. They have to "subject their employees to having to police child pornography" regardless of the fact that they host legal pornography. Twitter has plenty of legal porn without butting heads with this issue. Facebook doesn't allow porn and have to deal with the child pornography issue. Taking the stance of "we banned all porn because of child porn" is lazy and deflects responsibility and agency of their actions. They banned porn because the suits higher up said they didn't like it, full stop. Trying to save face with the community and blame child porn is dishonest when every platform, from 4chan to Facebook, has to police and report child porn.
jrnichols 8y ago
I don't believe it was a convenient lie. I personally reported A LOT of posts and entire blogs for very very very obviously inappropriate underage content, yet they still remained. Tumblr was quickly becoming a cesspool they couldn't clean.
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Every photo site since the beginning of user uploads has had this problem. This isn’t an issue if you decide to invest the resources into fixing it. That means hire people to look at photos. It means hooking in to the NCMEC / FBI’s database of known hashes. It’s buying (not even building) a content filter. These things exist. Tumblr decided not to bother, which forced them to panic and nuke the site from orbit. It’s a mess of their own making.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Every photo site since the beginning of user uploads has had this problem. This isn’t an issue if you decide to invest the resources into fixing it. That means hire people to look at photos. It means hooking in to the NCMEC / FBI’s database of known hashes. It’s buying (not even building) a content filter. These things exist. Tumblr decided not to bother, which forced them to panic and nuke the site from orbit. Tumblr had an entire team that did literally all of those things, for years. They did not "decide not to bother".
    - jonathankoren 8y ago
      Did they really bother though? I mean, I’m sure they have people employed, but something is seriously mismanaged. How did they let it get so bad? This should have never gotten to the point that another company had to say, “WTF is with all the child porn?” Saying you have team working on something, but not giving them appropriate resources, not taking the problem seriously, is same as not bothering. It’s same as saying, “We take your concerns seriously”, and then throwing the complaint in the trash. Their actions betray they’re true feelings.

fwip 8y ago

Unofficial rumors from tumblr staff say that the porn ban was already in the pipeline; the iOS ban just sped the timeline up by a month or two.