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You Can't Say That On the Internet
hessian writes in with a story about the arbitrary and often outdated online decency standards being imposed by companies."A bastion of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide. What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable. Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test."
Must.
Not.
Offend.
Anyone.
(unless the target is white males)
Perhaps if we could set our own content filters this would solve the problem? I'm uncomfortable with others deciding whose nipples I can and can't see.
Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A
Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test
LOL facebook is for middle aged women to check every 15 seconds for new pixs of their friends kids or pix of their "fur babies" aka over pampered dogs, and teenage girls to sling insults at each other and compete about friend counts. Guys mostly post "blackmail pixs" for fun of their buddies throwing up, getting high, or getting it on with a landwhale.
"tits or GTFO" is not going to work on FB. Its middle aged woman / teen girl culture not online or whatever.
Now if you posted a nice rack on a "internet culture" area like 4chan or maybe a link here on /., that would more or less work.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
go use some other internets! Oh wait, you mean to say it's not the internets that is being censored? It's actually company or privately-owned websites that are accessed using the internet? And these companies and people who own these sites are able to set the bar for what is allowed on their site? There are many wonderfully open sites out there that will gladly let you post whatever you want despite you not being owed anything by them. Why is this a problem? And kerfuffle? Seriously?
Some Google autocompletes are almost comical. Enter "peni" and you get "penicillin", "peninsular", and "panistone paramount". Who would have known that a small town cinema would appear to be more important to Google than the male organ!
You can show any type of violence. You can't show any kind of nudity. And it's not the "digital culture" in general that imposes anything. It's the religious fundamentalists of the USA who are responsible. I think the world would be a better place if we allowed children to watch porn and didn't allow them to watch violence.
Captcha: morale
"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene."
- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Francis Ford Copolla's Apocalypse Now!
What about sexualised imagery (not just the videos; Some of the lyrics are plainly obscene) in pop music, when showing just a boob gets a show an adult cert in the US. Not a problem seeing real boobs at the beach, though!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
A bastion of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A.
When has Chick-fil-A ever called for censorship? Last I checked, progressives were abusing government power to silence Chick-fil-A, not the other way around.
Sorry, I just can't approve of a company that doesn't support delicious chicken sandwiches.
But no, really - I see what's going on here. "We're tolerant of everything - unless it's something we don't find culturally acceptable." Yep, that passes liberal scrutiny.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The original idea behind free speech was that no one could prevent you from making a political statement.
Then, by popular demand, free speech got cheesed out to mean "any public statement," whether relevant or not.
This blurred the line between important speech and everyday raging around with emotions through words.
Now, we the people see all speech as a matter of flavor. Don't harsh my buzz with your unkind words, man.
As a result, the free markets are responding and are removing words that generate expensive customer complaints.
They're removing them whether there's validity to them or not.
Good work, We the People.
In parts of the Middle East, a woman showing her hair is considered harlotry, while in parts of Polynesia a woman going topless is not. In some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, women going topless is ok, but showing her thighs is obscene. If you're operating globally, who's cultural norms do you use for censorship? Because about the only pictures of women that are universally acceptable would have everyone in burqas.
It gets even more complicated than that: Do you allow Eve topless, but not the Virgin Mary? Do you allow Venus de Milo or Michaelangelo's David, but not modern nude art? If you allow nude sculptures or paintings, do you censor nude photographs? If you allow nude photographs, what's the line between works of art and porn?
I am officially gone from
That bared nipple in a cartoon thing? Not an algorithm (at least not one implemented on a computer) -- that was censored by a plain ol' minimum-wage human.
Those are the things you can't say. Not without getting soaked, anyway.
Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.
Silicon Valley is tech. It enables. But it is not in control. There is no such thing as a unified "digital culture."
Online communities --- like any other --- form around people who share the same interests and values. The geek is not always going to like what he finds out there.
"Dour, one-dimensional algorithms" didn't decide cartoon nipples are taboo in Texarkana. People did.
Don't like it? Start making as much noise when something is censored as the prudes do when they see a bare boob on the boob tube.
0 1 - just my two bits
...it happens to a New York media person, instead of by them like God intended.
The author has three examples for his "censorship" arguement: Facebook blocking a page containing cartoon nipples (but it was the New Yorker's page, so that's bad!), Apple asterixing out some letters in the name of a book, and various autocorrects not helpfullying filling out dirty words for you. That's it.
The first two are pretty damn obvious. iTunes and Facebook operate walled gardens. Monolithic control of the content, whether you like it or not, is exactly the problem with such systems. The only thing annoying about this is that Evgeny and his buddies at the Times saw no problem with this until it inconvienenced other New York media types like themselves. The obivious solution here, which I and a good portion of the rest of us here on Slashdot implement, it don't use them.
The third is just plain sillyness. Of course you don't want autocompletion software to fill out explitives for you. You have to look at how things fail here. Autocomplete is a prediction, but it isn't perfect, and the last thing you want is the damn thing changing innocuous words to one of the Carlin 7 when you are texting your family or employer. Duh.
If I want a "bad" word, I'll go through the effort to manually spell it. It's typically only 4 letters anyway. :-)