4 ms·

That was (according to reports) because of the prevalence of child pornography on their platform, which they apparently didn't have the tools or staff to police

That was (according to reports) because of the prevalence of child pornography on their platform, which they apparently didn't have the tools or staff to police. A blanket ban on pornographic content was cheaper and/or easier.

deogeo 8y ago
Presumably child porn was already banned on Tumblr, so how does banning all other porn as well help?
- protomyth 8y ago
  Flagging all skin is much easier than determining age of person showing skin.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    If they cared about making the filtering easy then I'm not seeing why they banned drawings too.
    - protomyth 8y ago
      If you look at a lot of this IDing software, it grabs drawings too. Add some ok drawings in Photo in iOS and watch it add it to the faces list.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        It can but it makes the classification job significantly more complicated.
        protomyth 8y ago
        Interesting, because it seems like it will pick up drawings for free because it doesn’t distinguish between photos and drawings (Photo on iOS for example will pick up line drawings of people). I actually thought it would a harder problem to exclude the drawings based on some of these facial id programs.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        A lot of drawings don't look at all like photos, and they are banned too. That's definitely not for free.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Since people don't go through a visually obvious physical change at the moment of attaining legal adulthood, banning all porn leaves less cracks for child porn to get through. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right policy, but it does.make a difference.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  I believe they're using some automated filtering (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/). I assume it's easier to train an AI to recognise pornography generally, rather than a specific kind -- and now that I think about it, the process of training an AI to recognise child porn sounds extremely unpleasant and legally dubious.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > I believe they're using some automated filtering (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/). I assume it's easier to train an AI to recognise pornography generally, rather than a specific kind -- and now that I think about it, the process of training an AI to recognise child porn sounds extremely unpleasant and legally dubious. Quite the opposite - it's much easier to allow pornography and ban only child pornography than it is to create an automated system to detect pornography. PhotoDNA makes it easy to find matches, which can then be used to uncover the networks of people posting child pornography, which are then added back to the database. It doesn't require any computer vision at all. By contrast, banning all pornography does require computer vision of some sort, and that's much more difficult, as evidenced by how terrible the new Tumblr NSFW content detector is.
    - retsibsi 8y ago
      Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but PhotoDNA seems to be a tool for identifying reposts and edits of already known illegal images -- those that have previously been found and had their hashes entered into the database. So if Tumblr had a problem with original content (which could include underage users posting explicit pictures of themselves, as well as the worse things we think of when we hear the phrase 'child porn'), I don't think that would help. edit: I found this quote from an article[1] published last November: "In its updated statement, Tumblr said that while every image uploaded to the platform is “scanned against an industry database of child sexual abuse material” to filter out explicit images, a “routine audit” discovered content that was absent from the database, allowing it to slip through the filter." So it looks like they might have already been using PhotoDNA. [1] 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-...

deogeo 8y ago

Presumably child porn was already banned on Tumblr, so how does banning all other porn as well help?

protomyth 8y ago
Flagging all skin is much easier than determining age of person showing skin.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  If they cared about making the filtering easy then I'm not seeing why they banned drawings too.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    If you look at a lot of this IDing software, it grabs drawings too. Add some ok drawings in Photo in iOS and watch it add it to the faces list.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      It can but it makes the classification job significantly more complicated.
      - protomyth 8y ago
        Interesting, because it seems like it will pick up drawings for free because it doesn’t distinguish between photos and drawings (Photo on iOS for example will pick up line drawings of people). I actually thought it would a harder problem to exclude the drawings based on some of these facial id programs.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        A lot of drawings don't look at all like photos, and they are banned too. That's definitely not for free.
dragonwriter 8y ago
Since people don't go through a visually obvious physical change at the moment of attaining legal adulthood, banning all porn leaves less cracks for child porn to get through. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right policy, but it does.make a difference.
retsibsi 8y ago
I believe they're using some automated filtering (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/). I assume it's easier to train an AI to recognise pornography generally, rather than a specific kind -- and now that I think about it, the process of training an AI to recognise child porn sounds extremely unpleasant and legally dubious.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > I believe they're using some automated filtering (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-ai-adult-content/). I assume it's easier to train an AI to recognise pornography generally, rather than a specific kind -- and now that I think about it, the process of training an AI to recognise child porn sounds extremely unpleasant and legally dubious. Quite the opposite - it's much easier to allow pornography and ban only child pornography than it is to create an automated system to detect pornography. PhotoDNA makes it easy to find matches, which can then be used to uncover the networks of people posting child pornography, which are then added back to the database. It doesn't require any computer vision at all. By contrast, banning all pornography does require computer vision of some sort, and that's much more difficult, as evidenced by how terrible the new Tumblr NSFW content detector is.
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but PhotoDNA seems to be a tool for identifying reposts and edits of already known illegal images -- those that have previously been found and had their hashes entered into the database. So if Tumblr had a problem with original content (which could include underage users posting explicit pictures of themselves, as well as the worse things we think of when we hear the phrase 'child porn'), I don't think that would help. edit: I found this quote from an article[1] published last November: "In its updated statement, Tumblr said that while every image uploaded to the platform is “scanned against an industry database of child sexual abuse material” to filter out explicit images, a “routine audit” discovered content that was absent from the database, allowing it to slip through the filter." So it looks like they might have already been using PhotoDNA. [1] 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-...