Meta's digital censorship targets art from the Leopold Museum | Hacker News Reader

Meta's digital censorship targets art from the Leopold Museum

english.elpais.com

38 pointsgeox12 comments

The prudishness of censorship has always been a blight upon people's ability to express freely in interesting ways. It's even sadder to see it take spread in the supposedly liberal modern world like never before through bland corporate algorithmic controls enforced by emotionally stunted PR functionaries, blanketing the digital world with saccharine expressive mediocrity.

Amusingly, this algorithmic censorship within contrived social media "communities" is being enforced by some of the most morally bankrupt, psychologically parasitic technology companies on the planet.

Does Target have a right to not sell porn? Or is that censorship?

I don't think Target deals with user generated content so it's a bit of a different situation.

I'd suggest you learn a bit more about the practice of valid comparisons.

The prudishness of censorship has always been a blight upon people's ability to express freely in interesting ways.

I disagree. Expression is separate from distribution. People are almost always free to express themselves. Sometimes, they can only do it in private or anonymously. This is why safe spaces are important. Additionally, interesting artistic expression can be a reaction to censorship.

Maybe a simple analogy is rock n roll music or rap music. At a time, it was was being censored way worse than this. After reaching critical mass despite not having mainstream infrastructure, it thrives today. Just because something isn't mainstream, it doesn't mean it's not being expressed, cultivated, consumed or explored. Just like there were clubs that supported alternative music, there are corners of the "digital world" that support art of all kinds.

On that note, a lot of people were smart and embraced the Streisand Effect. Come see the art Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to see :)

You disagree that censorship has historically been a stain on free expression? Or do you disagree with some deeper point? Do you really think the big tech platforms' algorithmic blocking of content with nearly zero human intervention in all the absurdities that happen is generally a good thing? Do you also think that the modern tech platform attitude towards nudity and sexuality (visibly, decidedly censorious) is a good thing as well?

I won't even ask about the utter stupidity that is blocking historic works of art because a brainless algorithm can't distinguish one human creation from another in the right way.

Set aside your notion of whether banning pornographic material / nudity is acceptable or not for a moment.

> “The problem lies in the automated system used to detect and review the content,” says Pia Semorad. “Technology fails to distinguish between artistic nudity and real photographs, and images are constantly blocked, making our account unsearchable. This amounts to censorship on social media, even if we are not violating the rules.”

What's to stop someone from creating an OF and asking AI to painting-ify their pornography?

If you ask the average person, "hey, should nudity from {the 1400s|last week} be censored under pornography rules?", they'd probably say no to the first and yes to the latter.

But how do you differentiate? How is Meta supposed to know there's cultural / historical significance to something?

>Technology fails to distinguish between artistic nudity and real photographs

And what about the artistic value of real, fine art photographs?

For the people debating on the line between art and pornography: That's really not the point of the article at all.

The point they're making is that large tech companies (an in particular Meta) want all the benefits of having lots of users, without the investment needed to account for them. They therefore use technology in place of humans to detect policy violations. Since art is a human thing (see debates here), machines are not suitable for this purpose.

Meta uses them anyway because their business model falls apart if they don't.

All this while facebook reels are full of backlit woman genitals covered with highly transparent silk, so you can see the unmistakable silhouettes? :DD

I browse a lot of content on instagram and facebook too. Facebook has some very nasty memory hog traps, maybe targeted against content farmers. Some tabs can eat up all your memory, OO protecc kicks in, and your session is killed on Linux. Under windows, everything is dandy. Maybe it's some weird bug in their JS scripts.

Instagram ops people are just plain psycho. If you try to view someone's account on desktop without logging in, it just throws back a something went wrong page and that's all. You cannot view any more insta pages for 1-2 days without logging in.

For the last week every time I login to Facebook I get a notification they’ve removed multiple of my posts due to community guideline violations. It can’t show me the posts in question or give more details.

The really strange part is I’m not posting at all…

The debate on where to draw the line between art and lewd is as old as time. In short, any platform that allows child accounts will default to a stricter interpretation.

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