New technology that blocks imagery
Facebook, the social media giant that is nearing 2 billion global users, will be stepping up its efforts to prevent certain types of pictures (i.e revenge p*rn) from appearing on its end users feeds. The news was announced Wednesday.
As reported in USA Today, “Once a revenge p*rn picture is reported and removed, new artificial intelligence, photo-matching technologies will are used to prevent that same image from being posted on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.”
Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page that sharing intimate photographs online as a means of shaming an person is, “wrong, hurtful and if you report it to us, we will now use AI and image recognition to prevent it from being shared across all of our platforms.”
Recently, Facebook started to flag so called “disputed news” items that appear on its platform because of serious concerns that were raised about the company’s role in spreading fake news among its users.
More: “My ex got me fired with revenge p*rn”
In the past, Facebook has also faced challenges in the past trying to police sexually charged imagery from spreading.
“We will now use AI and image recognition”
As reported in the New York Times:
“The tools announced on Wednesday are intended to address a uniquely modern and pernicious form of harassment, often but not exclusively aimed at women, that has attracted increasing attention.
In March, for example, a report that active-duty and veteran Marines had used Facebook to share naked and private photos of thousands of women in the Marine Corps prompted a congressional hearing and a Defense Department investigation.”
Wired News ran a piece with the following:
“Legally speaking, it’s a good move for Facebook too. If sharing revenge p*rnography becomes a federal crime—which Franks and congressional representative Jackie Speier (D-California) are working on—Facebook is going to need to find some shelter.
As with criminalized content like child p*rn or terrorist videos, online intermediaries like Facebook would be legally obligated to report revenge p*rn to the powers that be, retain evidence, and take good faith measures to stop its spread.
The photo-matching technology would help the company do that. “This is one of the ways Facebook could signal they are trying to address this problem in the same way as child p*rnography.”
