
Photos That Violated Facebook's Policies - fogus
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml
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cs702
A very understandable misfire by FB's porn detection algorithms, considering
the unintentionally saucy text submitted with those cute photos of Nut the
cat: _"...Here you can see in more detail how Nut presses her face as hard as
she can into mine. She does this all night, by the way. If I move my face
away, she rearranges herself to grip the back of my head as tightly as
possible. If I'm face-down on the pillow..."_

\--

Edit: changed "probable" to "very understandable," and quoted some of the text
submitted with those photos.

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svachalek
I hadn't thought about the language. I noticed there's an awful lot of skin-
tone with the extreme closeup angle there. Even if they do have face
detection, it may be too close to even catch it.

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Irregardless
Just call customer serv... oh, nevermind. You pay Facebook by surrendering
privacy and personal information, but that's not enough for them to consider
you a customer or offer support. The same server that automatically flagged
your harmless photo will gladly issue you an equally automatic and thoughtless
rejection when you appeal.

The faceless Facebook machine will march on, paying no regard to the innocent
consumers it accidentally crushes in pursuit of more ad views.

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eik3_de
Obvious: The cat was completely naked.

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cullenking
I saw three people on my own facebook feed complaining of their photos being
flagged as inappropriate. My take is that this is a new feature or a
regression.

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libria
A false positive on a facebook algorithm warrants an entire "my liberties are
being trampled" article? All follow-up notifications are obviously automated
dominoes falling from the initial warning; why the feigned surprise?

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apendleton
It's not just the false positive. If the algorithms had misclassified her
photos, but there had been a straightforward grievance process to reverse the
decision and allow the obviously-non-pornographic photos, I doubt it would
have been article-worthy, but the presumption of guilt, unintuitive process,
and requirement that users signify agreement to things they don't actually
agree to before continuing to interact with the service are all problematic.

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oellegaard
I hate how companies wants to decide how one can use their freedom of speech.
If I wanted to post nude photos of myself on facebook, well, why shouldn't I
be allowed it? Maybe they could force them not to be public, but friends only.
Then people could unfriend people, if they were offensive.

Same with Apple not allowing nude pictures on their iBook store.

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sukuriant
Well, you're using their servers, so it's not really a freedom of speech
issue. When you're on their servers, its their rules; and if you don't like
those rules they'll politely inform you (when they're policies they can't
change) that you can go elsewhere.

And when you start providing that sort of adult content, I imagine (in the US
at least) different rules begin to go into play. Just to be friends with
someone, you'd need to prove you're 18+; because, as you defined it, some
friends-only photos could be 18+. Then you've got other issues, like what it
makes facebook look like. When it's possible to have pornography on a website,
it changes the demographic that's willing to go to that website. It certainly
wouldn't be a large percentage of the world, like it is now.

Showing pornography also affects the kind of people that are willing to
advertise on your site, and so you may lose money that way. Mature images open
a biiiig can of worms.

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dutchbrit
It's quite possible that the photo was marked as inappropriate by someone else
- or their filter picked on the description. I can see how an algorithm could
easily find that dirty. Should be interesting to see how this turns out

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tomjen3
This is exactly one of the cases where it would be helpful (and good for
Facebooks PR) to have some customer support.

Or even a basic -- let 10% of my friends review this and then come back --
option would be better than that.

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Mz
Given the suggestive text, "cat" was clearly a polite euphemism.

