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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

You don't need an AI to fight child porn, the FBI publishes a huge database of hashes that make it very easy to fight it, and if I remember the Tumblr reponse to the Apple ban correctly, they've been using it for a while.

That being said, I also believe the apple ban wasn't explicitly because of cp, but also because an app known for NSFW conflicts with their "image", in the same manner ad companies also refuse to associate with it, but couldn't use that as the reason due to the PR backlash Tumblr is getting now

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I don't think it's that kind of child pornography. It's more the self produced, coming of age, scantily clad variety that is non-trivial to moderate.

The most offensive to modern sensibilities (and advertisers) isn't the naked people, but the gore, self harm, and extreme fetish communities.

Can you imagine the irreparable harm caused to society by teenagers taking half naked selfies?

It's not the selfies that are the problem. It's the poor boundaries that they create and the leveraged shame that is really harmful. It's very hard to put a hard barrier or rule about what kind of nipples are okay to show, as the EFF is implying.

On the other hand, there's just as much harm from the no-shame communities - look up pro-ana for an example, and the realize that groups like this exist for many forms of self harm, including cutting, drug abuse, and (and this one is personal to me) rape.

https://youtu.be/Y7lYeRqhQ9Q is a good example of how young people can be drawn into these sorts of toxic relationships. And he worst part is: most of the warning signs aren't a problem in and of themselves. It is only in patterns and degrees that you realize that there's something deeply wrong, and the behavior has crossed a line. The lines aren't bright and clear - but, to some extent, the people who wander even near and don't immediately turn away are the ones you know are willing to cross it.

I don't have to imagine, I can read a news article from several years ago about how a teenager did just this from//to//in an Arab country and it made global headlines because exactly that.

So is the issue the teen or the Arab country?

This still prompts a question, though: does this not happen on all social media?

Ok, Facebook presumably dodges the problem with privacy settings. But it's no harder to post an underage selfie on Reddit or Twitter than on Tumblr, and those sites have much larger userbases. Their apps haven't been hit by Apple, nor have they ever talked about resorting to outright adult-content bans to control it.

So what's the difference? Are there any major theories other than "tumblr's site moderation tools sucked" and "tumblr's moderation team was way too small"?

Hashes of what, the image or video content? Wouldn't those be ridiculously easy to circumvent by uploaders via, e.g., changing one pixel?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA

> PhotoDNA is a technology developed by Microsoft [...]

Some other services by MS that might build on this:

* https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services

* https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services

> but also because an app known for NSFW conflicts with their "image"

Anecdotal, but I once found overt prostitution on a classifieds app on the App Store. It’s an app with no category for such services and an age rating of 4+. We’re talking full blown nudity, with a phone number and a link to another site with yet more photos. I know (thought) Apple cared about that, so I reported the situation. They shrugged it off and said it was the developer’s responsibility. I pointed out that web browsers have a 17+ rating exactly because they allow access to that type of content. They still didn’t care.

Safari is full of porn and by that same measure so are iOS Chrome and iOS Firefox. I'm pretty sure Twitter is full of porn too. DMM, a porn company has an iOS App as I think do several VR porn companies.

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