
Tumblr was removed from Apple’s App Store over child pornography issues - ikeboy
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-child-pornography-removed-from-app-store
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devwastaken
Tumblr like any website with image content is liable to have illigal images on
it. Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an
app, is playing favorites and making excuses.

Its difficult enough to have reliable, safe sites where arists can create,
share in legal artistic pornography, but with Tumblr being forced to mass-wipe
things they're deleting both sfw and nsfw content. Most likely based upon
reports, which in Tumblr culture are typically fake.

There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this
manner, as this is real loss of profits involved, but I doubt it would work.
Either way Tumblr is gonna lose a good amount of it's userbase.

~~~
jmull
>Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an
app, is playing favorites and making excuses.

That doesn't match what they are claiming though.

Apple requires such sites to have a filter to prevent child-porn and the claim
here is that Tumblr was removed for not having one that works. If those other
services have a filter that works (sufficiently, I guess) while Tumblr
doesn't, then it's not playing favorites, it's just having a policy and
enforcing it. To limit the dissemination of child-porn. It might be hard to
sue for that.

~~~
wlesieutre
Safari to be removed from iOS 13 due to child pornography issues because some
websites don’t have a filter

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alphabettsy
Safari has a site filter, Tumblr doesn’t.

How effective filters are is another question, but Apple has long stated rules
that apps must not provide access to “objectionable” content without some kind
of access control which doesn’t seem to meaningfully exist on Tumblr.

~~~
devwastaken
Tumblr has NSFW filtering. You have to be logged in to see nafw tumblrs, and
have it active on your settings, iirc.

~~~
alphabettsy
I’m aware, I use it regularly. I’m also saying it doesn’t work.

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salmonfamine
If you've been on Tumblr recently, you'll know that it's a pretty hands-off
place. You get the general sense that Yahoo! fired everyone who worked at
Tumblr and now it's just running on a server somewhere.

~~~
donatj
As a long time user I think this is largely a misrepresentation. It really
feels same as it's ever been.

~~~
xanipher
Yeah, but the Tumblr code and infrastructure was always a bit special. Few
sites of this dimension had so many major bugs.

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bears_burger_42
Ugh, I'm sure no one will really care about this comment but tumblr absolutely
has a terrible child porn problem.

I basically stopped using tumblr for porn because of how much nude, as well as
non nude pictures of kids I've reported to tumblr.

It's a big issue. It's also incredibly easy to find child porn on there and
despite reporting it, it always seems to pop back up.

I get that people will post shit regardless but it really seems like they
don't try to do anything but delete the single blog that has been reported.

This is a site that's based around people "liking" and "reblogging" content.
It's insane to see a picture of some kid being exploited, see how many blogs
have reblogged and/or liked the picture, and then see how tumblr doesn't even
attempt to address these blogs that clearly are doing the same thing, clearly
liking the same things, and clearly reblogging the same pictures as the
reported blog.

I've reported blogs for harm to minors well over 20 times. It's a drag.

~~~
FooHentai
Yes, agree. I left for the same reason.

The irony is that the same mechanism that allows that content to propagate is
also the perfect tool for eliminating it. Liked/reblogged the content? Banned.

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lostgame
Two things:

1 ) I'm unfortunately not surprised. For my girlfriends and I, Tumblr was
basically effectively a place to express our lesbian-ness and effectively
collect 'tasteful' nudes.

It wouldn't shock me in the least to find teenagers doing a similar thing,
which, of course, would be illegal.

While others are saying that Tumblr was sort of picked on unfairly here, I'd
argue the percentage of NSFW content that's easily-accessible on Tumblr is, in
my personal experience, much higher than that of many other social networks.

2 ) That folks are still using Tumblr is a surprise to me. It seems as though
many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago.

~~~
Tiktaalik
> It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5
> years ago.

Seems common for platforms to wind down and for exoduses to occur, but I
haven't heard of another tumblr-like. Where did people head off to?

~~~
lostgame
Nowhere, to be honest.

We read books. We listen to records. We have actual human interaction. It's
awesome.

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zapzupnz
I can't call myself too surprised considering that 'tumblr' and 'filtering'
aren't so much strange bedfellows as perfect strangers.

I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of
filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much
unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by
iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way.

Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of
other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer
access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a
__huge __backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if
highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate.

tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one
entirely of their own design.

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alistproducer2
I'm always surprised that these web 2.0 sites don't pay people to surf and
flag content. It doesn't take much google-fu to find all sorts of stuff on the
clearnet that shouldn't be there. I understand that removing offending stuff
from Google search itself is very difficult but the walled garden sites like
tumblr are much easier as most of the offending stuff is usually linked
together by repost and/or likes. Find one page doing something it shouldn't
and follow the likes and reposts down the rabbit hole flagging and removing as
you go along.

~~~
css
It doesn’t help that Tumblr had no way to flag posts on mobile (both mobile
web and in-app). There was too much friction involved in sending a report
which is unlike every other social network I use.

~~~
alistproducer2
There are a lot of weird quirks with Tumblr that I don't understand like how
some pages will only open up in the dashboard.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Those are marked as "private" if you view those blogs in an incognito window
(not logged into Tumblr) it will tell you that the blog is private and you
must log in to view the blog. That's entirely the user's decision to make
their blog private to the public.

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bgarbiak
One commenter in the OP article pointed an interesting aspect of it: it's
widely required, and considered totally feasible to preemptively filter
pornography from the user uploaded stuff, and yet: even the giants like
YouTube will fall under the burden of copyright filters demanded by EU.

No wonder then that politics usually introduce laws related the Internet under
the "safe the children" slogan. It really does changes the perception.

~~~
eridius
An "is this child pornography" filter is a wildly different beast than "is
this copyright infringement".

The crucial difference is something either is or is not child pornography,
regardless of context. But whether something is copyright infringement depends
on a whole variety of factors, and the exact same content uploaded by two
different people might be a violation in one case and not in the other.

~~~
bgarbiak
Of course, child porn is easier to identify. For a human eye.

Also, in case of Apple and their App Store it’s not only CP, it is all kind of
NSFW content that has to be filtered out. And that can be nuanced.

It appears that for now the filter mechanism is simple: the content is scanned
against known database of bad stuff. So, a twist on a Content ID.

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sascha_sl
There really needs to be a FOSS model for detecting this stuff. As someone who
got in trouble with the police hosting user generated content I've essentially
stopped doing it entirely, although I'd want to.

There are some services that you can funnel content through, but getting
access to them is tricky and getting a hit adds some reporting and compliance
requirements, not to mention I'd be piping all my users images straight though
microsofts servers.

~~~
bertil
There is: PhotoDNA. The name sounds neutral, by design, but don’t let it fool
you: unless your boss explicitly tells you this is your project now, I’d
recommend you stay far away.

Well, I’m not sure it’s FOSS or anything like that: it’s maintained by the
police (a weak assortment of the services that handle that in different
countries) and it has a key feature: it’s a bloom/hash filter of sorts, i.e.
you don’t need to open the image to make it work (because even opening the
file would be illegal). It recognises photos similar to those already flagged
(which are absolutely not free, open or available in any way for obvious
reasons). A typical implementation is to move the flagged image in a dedicated
folder with very strict access-control, keep really reliable traceability and
send details to your local dedicated police team. Even access to the filters
is tightly controlled too, because the wrong kind of people could use it to
sift through a lot of images.

Because it’s a fairly standard tool for any image hosting company, I’m
surprised Tumblr has been shamed. Either they messed up their integration, or
they ignored police requests. It’s odd.

~~~
ballenf
> even opening the file would be illegal

Not an expert, but I've worked with large companies that used humans to filter
user content. Either they were breaking the law en masse deliberately or there
is a safe harbor for doing manual filtering.

Again, I don't know the answer, but I'm very skeptical that it's always
illegal to manually filter user content. Presumably swift deletion (and cache
purging, if possible), reporting and record-keeping would be important.
Although that does raise the issue of how you preserve evidence for police to
take action if you delete it immediately... geez this is such a landmine.

~~~
MrStonedOne
There is an affirmative defence in most jurisdictions for reporting cp you
come in contact with.

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mooseburger
Is there really a point to being this strict about child pornography? I'm
still uncomfortable with the implications of certain configurations of numbers
being illegal, and it's unlikely these laws/bans protect any children, unless
there are people who exclusively rape children to distribute the resulting
images and videos, which seems dubious.

I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything
further seems like overreach.

~~~
kstrauser
The more restricted an item is, the more a few remaining loyalists will pay to
obtain it. We've seen this play out a thousand times with drugs. I infer,
then, that there's probably a small set of people making a mint by literally
raping children to distribute the resulting images and videos.

And I still think enforcement of these laws should be absolutely draconian.
This isn't a victimless crime: real lives are being absolutely destroyed. It's
not like legalizing weed where suddenly you have a lot of people using it
openly and responsibly. There _is_ no acceptable degree of child rape that we
can tolerate in society.

I'm 100% with you if we were talking about file sharing. I'm 100% opposed to
you on this specific subject.

~~~
excalibur
The problem is that the definition of child pornography is fairly broad, and
the laws make little to no distinction between the various categories within
it. Draconian enforcement is great for the hardened criminals profiting from
child rape, but it also leads to locking up teenagers for possessing photos of
themselves.

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ceejayoz
Wait until the review team discover Safari...

~~~
greglindahl
If you look at browser apps and search engine apps, they're rated 17+.

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helsinki
There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.

~~~
msla
> There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.

But none of it's accessible unless you have a direct URL, and even then the
pornographic crazy stuff is taken down quickly. The Imgur front page is pretty
sanitized.

~~~
helsinki
The first few years of Imgur data sits behind five randomly generated
alphanumeric characters. Quite easy to brute force...

~~~
jonknee
That is _very_ different from getting to it from browsing.

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Macuyiko
Can't say I'm surprised. Tumblr has been so full of (non child) pornographic
and outright weird material that it was due to attract this sort of folk as
well. It really detracts from the platform for the rest of us, who just want
to use it as a micro-blogging platform sitting between Twitter and Medium
(where strangely, Tumblr has been horrible in finding its position).

Either Yahoo should clamp down and meanwhile give the platform a solid update
-- otherwise they'll probably shut it down sometime in the future. I can image
the cost of running it must be pretty high.

~~~
devwastaken
I don't agree with this slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp.
Tumblr is an image hosting site, any and all image hosters are used to
distribute that kind of content.

~~~
freehunter
I don't think it's a "slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp" but
rather once people realize that there is no moderation and no rules and no one
will shut them down, it turns into the Wild West. If criminals learn that
there are no police officers anymore, they know they can get away with
committing any crimes without punishment.

Since tumblr will host things other sites won't, eventually someone will push
the envelope and if they don't get shut down it will get pushed further and
further. It's not about "any porn -> child porn", it's a progressive
furthering of what is/is not allowed, and once you learn everything is allowed
and nothing is banned, child porn (and other illegal content) is an
inevitability.

~~~
Macuyiko
Agreed. I didn't want to infer that any porn leads to child porn (that would
be ridiculous), but about oversight, which Tumblr lacks.

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ralusek
Is the OS responsible? The browser? The client application?

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troyvoy88
So first Gab now Tumblr. The only ones that remain and very likely will always
remain untouched because they are standing in higher moral ground. The holy
and all mighty lords and saviors Twitter and Facebook.

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irl_zebra
One of these things is not like the other.

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troyvoy88
Please elaborate.

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exabrial
To add a whataboutism, what about Snapchat?

