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.
Meta's policies discriminate against sex workers
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+.
