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Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

> in that you know it when you see it

I would contend that one takeaway from companies like Facebook is that this phrase doesn't actually hold up all that well on a global Internet.

Facebook originally classified breast-feeding as explicit. At the time there was actual controversy about whether or not it fit into that category (public perception now is mostly that it didn't). Facebook's shift from "no pornography" to "here's a giant document about exactly what is and isn't pornography down to the number of nipples you show" feels to me like the white flag of a company that has decided it no longer knows it when it sees it.

I think "you know it when you see it" works very well for small, tight-nit communities, and maybe not quite so well as soon as as you start operating on the scale of a country. On that scale, I kind of prefer the narrower definitions we have on stuff like libel and slander.

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The problem with "you know it when you see it", even in tight-knit communities, is that it's used to shut down discussion: If you know it when you see it, then it's obvious, and if you're trying to argue the point, well, only a troll argues the obvious, innit? Nobody could disagree in good faith, so the only conclusion is that you're trying to make trouble and should be shut down.

It's logically indefensible, in that there isn't enough to it to make a logical case to defend it, which means the people proposing ideas like these must believe that either their ideas are so widely shared that nobody would ever try to attack it, or that they'll be able to destroy anyone who does attack it through means other than calm, logical argumentation. That second possibility frightens me.

I know a group of people that are sexually aroused by seeing someones eyes. It is not a small or fringe group. There is another even larger group that are aroused by feet. What are we to do about the feet pictures and videos?

There is a sub-group among them that are further aroused by sharing pictures of child feet on facebook. Something about doing that in public makes it more exciting for them.

I think the problem there is that "you know it when you see it" scales poorly. Humans are (usually) reasonably good at handling "you know it when you see it" heuristics, even if there is disagreement on edge cases. But "you know it when you see it" is difficult to implement algorithmically, and handling content at the scale of Facebook requires that you have algorithmic processes in place to automatically handle most of the firehose.

I think the problem there is that different communities have completely different standards for what pornography (or any other category) is, but Facebook is hoping that they'll all use the same Facebook. Scaling any one group's definition of pornography to the rest of the world won't work even if the technical aspects of scaling go perfectly. You have two (...billion) people who all "know it when they see it", but consistently make different judgements when shown the same content.

There is an underlying assumption that a given image has a certain property. I don't think it does. I think the property is based on the user viewing it. That's why an innocent silly image proud parents may send to grandparents is at the same time an image that you don't want to be in the possession of someone with less innocent thoughts. It isn't that the image is right or wrong. It is that different people will see different things in the image, some good and others bad.

You keep saying 'property', do you mean 'propriety'or are you literally speaking of the ownership of images when uploaded to Facebook?

Just asking if in the interest of other readers who come along because at first I couldn't grok the connection between how one feels about certain imagery and retaining ownership of one's uploads.

Your parent comment is using 'property' in the second sense of the word ([QUALITY]) given here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/property

> a quality in a substance or material, especially one that means that it can be used in a particular way

It's also sense 1a given here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/property

> a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing

The comment says that many people are assuming that a photograph has "the property of being pornographic", and this is a mistake in their thought. Ownership and propriety are not related to the comment in any way.

Ahhh synonyms. They always get you when you're not looking. Thank you for clearing my confusion up.

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