...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.
Their employees still need to moderate their platform and ensure there's no child porn. Banning regular, legal porn has zero bearing on this.
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.
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.
Evidently that wasn't sufficient to stop Apple removing them from the App Store, though.
[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3066654/tumblr-pul...
Except that's not what the issue was.
Why is it so hard to believe that there exists a solution to this that's much easier than training an image classifier?
As I've explained elsewhere, multiple times, this is a solved problem. There's no image analysis required.
You missed that part. That requires classification, either by a human or by an algorithm. There is no way around it.
I did not miss anything. "Previously unseen" only matters if your primary means of identifying people who share child porn is based on analyzing the content of images.
I'm very aware of how these systems work, not just at Tumblr but in the industry at large at other, larger companies. I'm not just speculating here; this is literally how NCMEC works and what they expect of companies that host user-generated content.
You may not like it, I can tell you're very upset at tumblr banning pornography, but this is the reality. Throw around as many of your qualifications as you like, it changes nothing.
NCMEC doesn't need those "magical powers" because NCMEC does not care about the latter. That's not their mandate. Hacker News loves to talk about age-of-consent and child pornography in the context of 17 year olds, but that's simply not relevant here. That's not the issue that Tumblr was facing pressure from.
> Throw around as many of your qualifications as you like, it changes nothing.
It sounds like you're so convinced in your own beliefs that even direct, firsthand knowledge of the inside situation won't change your mind, in which case you're right - there's no point in continuing this conversation.
You may not like that I know what actually went on here, and I can tell you're very upset that the actual facts about how NCMEC works and why Tumblr internally chose to make their decision don't support your narrative, but that's the reality. Whether you choose to believe it or not, it changes nothing.
And nor do you it seems, but tumblr now does. They've been forced to. You may not like it, but that's the reality of how tumblr is now operating. Tumblr can no longer turn a blind eye to any form of child pornography, and is no longer turning a blind eye to any form of child pornography.
Tumblr didn't ban all pornography for shits and giggles. They did it because given the current legal and social landscape it was their only economically viable option.
Tumblr may be a company. But it was also a community. Real relationships were made on there. I wasn't big on Tumblr but it meant the whole world to thousands of people growing up.
Verizon could make its decisions in the context of running a company, or in the context of running a community. They chose the former, because as a money machine they have no interest in spending capital to be the bearers of a meaningful online community which facilitates the formation of meaningful connections between people.
Aka cheap. Cheap is key, that's what Verizon cares about. Particularly since they're unable to monetize the legal pornographic content anyway, so ridding the site of it is doubly cheap.
The same thing happened when Yahoo was running the show, the bleed-out was just slower because they were more timid about making sweeping changes to Tumblr's ecosystem.
Instead of Yahoo or Verizon realizing that they weren't fit to run a community and divesting the company to more competent leadership, as money machines they were unable to recognize the human element behind these companies and ripped them to shreds trying to scrounge up pocket change.
Of course they do. It's foolish to ever believe that isn't the case, with any for profit corporation. Who do you expect to run tumblr as a charity?
Tumblr disintegrated because they lost sight of their community, first with the Yahoo acquisition, and again with the Verizon merger. And now it's useless to everyone, both the users and the people who thought they could squeeze it dry for a few bucks. There's nothing to argue with. That's simply the facts. You're arguing a straw man and you don't even have a point, you're just playing a poor devil's advocate.