And here we all thought any naughty image we wanted or contacting an escort was a mere mouse click or finger swipe away.
In a sure sign of the times, Meta told its Oversight Board just recently that they rely on what they call "media reports" when deciding to add permanent images to the database of its banned content. This policy was disclosed by Meta as a reply to the Oversight Board’s critique of Meta’s handling of what are being called "explicit AI images," or deepfakes.
The Oversight Board also recommended that Meta should change some of the language used in the definitions of prohibitions in its Adult Sexual Exploitation Community Standard and increase its internal policing of images added without consent regarding AI-generated stuff. Something many are legitimately concerned about beyond just Meta’s policies.
But there is a lot more to unpack from this little drip that Meta allowed us all to drink last week.
A media giant like Apple has made its feelings about porn quite clear. Having to skirt around the company’s restrictions or having to buy Android devices as well as an iPhone just to view NSFW content is annoying to say the least. But at least there is no doubt about Steve Jobs’s initial intent regarding adult material.
And it seems that Meta has taken a similar stance. According to many sex workers and creators of adult content, Meta has a lot more to answer for when one considers their seemingly indiscriminate ‘shadow-banning’ and the other censoring that occurs across the many websites the company owns.
And, the concerns go deeper than Meta’s current AI problems.
Ironically, Meta selected/created the Oversight Board to consider what they should do with, and how to define their vague and seemingly arbitrary definitions of adult content. In the past, Meta’s Community Standards moderators removed images for reasons that were, at the very least, vague, and often, as made clear by critics, even possibly against the company’s policies… whatever Meta's policy on adult material truly is. The Oversight Board has made it plain that some of the content the company has pulled comes from Meta’s decided binary view of gender, a lack of the specifics of a true policy regarding adult-themed material, and increased restrictions for people identifying as LGBTQI+.
Sex workers have also called out Meta for its weak, all-encompassing ban on what the company calls Sexual Solicitation. Again, this term is not clearly defined across the Meta's language.
Is Meta deliberately keeping their definitions unclear so they can continue to arbitrarily ban who they wish? Maybe they just don’t have a clear-cut policy on these matters, and never will, or will never care to. Whether they take their board’s suggestions to heart, time will tell, but for the time being we all just need to surf, best we can, what is and what is not happening to either the content we want to see or that which we post, as the playing field morphs to Mark Zuckerberg’s fancy when he might not know what he fancies anyway.
