“What you see is that we will shut this type of content down on our platform, but then people will hop to other platforms and spaces,” Davis said. “What would be great across industry is for us to share intelligence to disable someone from moving from one platform to another.”
Source: Send us your naked photos: An inside look at Facebook’s misunderstood efforts to tackle revenge porn
The very last line should be the takeaway. There are times when I feel I’m too cynical, but life has taught me that I’m usually not cynical enough. And, right now, my spider senses are going crazy.
As a lifetime computer programmer and administrator, I don’t think identifying explicit images is a difficult thing. It’s perhaps one of the most-researched topics in machine learning. Telling me that Facebook can’t identify naked bodies before the images have even finished uploading is ridiculous. Telling me that they won’t deploy another data center’s worth of computers to do so, and instead using idle time when the existing servers aren’t doing anything else… that I’d believe.
Reducing “mistakes” like revenge porn would reduce clicks, and spending money on more computers, and reducing ad impressions, are simply not conducive to making next months revenue predictions, and that might impact someone’s bonus. So it just isn’t going to happen. At this point, they’re doing just enough to avoid lawsuits.
It’s almost like they’re letting their lethargy in dealing with this create a power vacuum where they intend to be the central image warehouse for all of these decisions. Like, if they let this problem metastasize to get the press coverage, then, once they get serious about it, they’ll be able to sell their image-checking solution to other web sites, and become even larger, and responsible for more of the internet’s infrastructure.
It’s almost like Facebook won’t stop until they, or one of their subsidiaries, becomes the internet, and there are no other sites of any importance to visit.