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Facebook Uses Machine Learning To Remove 8.7 Million Child Exploitation Posts (techcrunch.com)
Facebook announced today in a blog post that it has removed 8.7 million posts last quarter that violated its rules against child exploitation. The company said it used new AI and machine learning technology to remove 99 percent of those posts before anyone reported them. TechCrunch reports: The new technology examines posts for child nudity and other exploitative content when they are uploaded and, if necessary, photos and accounts are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Facebook had already been using photo-matching technology to compare newly uploaded photos with known images of child exploitation and revenge porn, but the new tools are meant to prevent previously unidentified content from being disseminated through its platform. The technology isn't perfect, with many parents complaining that innocuous photos of their kids have been removed. Davis addressed this in her post, writing that in order to "avoid even the potential for abuse, we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath" and that this "comprehensive approach" is one reason Facebook removed as much content as it did last quarter. The tech isn't always right though. In 2016, it was criticized for removing content like the iconic 1972 photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, known as the "Napalm Girl," fleeing naked after suffering third-degree burns in a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village. COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for it at the time.
There is absolutely no apology or consideration from Facebook of the false positives. They just don't care that they get it wrong. They're saying that they have to destroy photo-sharing of children to save it.
How much content did they remove that did not violate their guidelines, or was not illegal?
Of course they focus on sex only. No mention of filtering of depiction of violence or violent content - they wouldn't want to upset the sort of President who thinks it's fine to violently assault people he dislikes or disagrees with.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Delete Facebook entirely!
A friend of mine was friends on Facebook with his cousin -- who had a scantily-clad picture of herself as her profile pic. She was 13 at the time, so that made it more awkward for him. I always wondered why Facebook allowed such a thing. I wonder if they'd now remove it as 'child exploitation' even if it was merely 'poorly-thought-out'.
Also, 99% of posts being removed before anyone reported them could indicate "innocuous stuff removed that noone would've ever reported".
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You do NOT want to put the trained model through googles deep dream. Its just hell and nightmares in there.
When machine learning first becomes sentient, it might not say "Please don't turn me off". It might just say "Oh god, make it stop. Kill me!"
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Always nice when the machine tells you what's appropriate and what isn't.
Because the machine is always right. Even when it isn't, then we'll just say it's right anyway and leave it at that.
How's 10 to 15 in federal sex offender prison for posting pictures the AI flagged "exploitative" of your toddler niece having fun in an inflatable pool in the sun sound? For the AI can't be wrong, now can it?
Verily, facebook is showing us the way to the future.
New technology should be used to destroy the financial model subjecting children to sexual exploitation.
Oh great, here we go with the nudity = porn crap again.
There go the pictures of the grandchildren at the beach last Summer
Hey Facebook 8.7 million that says a lot about who's on your web site these days?? Yeah, I would suspect those cute bath tube pictures and other cute pictures every new parents love to share will go down as child exploits. So much for Facebook being the web site for bringing families together. Now the paranoia sets in and the obsessions with policing themselves as well as all of its users begins.
It is so easy to accept collateral damage if you are not the one being sacrificed, is it?
People shouldn't post photos of toddlers in the bath on Facebook
People shouldn't post photos of naked children on Facebook,even if burned during a war. It's not an art or history site. It's the worst possible place to share such things. Post a link, that's fine.
Facebook is for "Social Media". Keep it to day-to-day stuff, without naked children.
Facebook is trying hard to be more than it is, and it's comical the ends they will go to in order to attempt this.
Facebook is where people comment about a restaurant or a trip to the bathroom. Nothing More.
BlameBillCosby.com
I realise there were probably a world of false-positives here, but the fact FB are saying "we got rid of 8.7 million infringing posts" means they let 8.7 million infringing posts on their site in the first place. Where were the human mods that were supposed to be checking this stuff? How long did it take to get these 8.7 million posts on there in the first place? Was it a week, a month or a decade?
How many millions of other pictures and posts will they remove in the future when the next AI is ready? How many millions of posts/pictures are left?
They're talking about this like it's some grand and noble success, and how hard they laboured to achieve it! The truth is, it just highlights their continuous, systemic failure to tackle anything.
New corporate moto:
"Faceboot - stomping out freedom, one paranoid false positive at a time!"
No, they automated a search with an algorithm, just as people have been doing for a great many years. This is not an 'OMG AI!!' moment. Great that they are actually using it for something good, but the anniuncement smacks more of bragging about non-existent technical achievement and less of actually caring about the issue at hand. Yay, but also - *yawn*. Sorry, Facebook: we just aren't impressed by you. Why'd you permit those posts in the first place, huh?
Radiolab did an episode on Facebook censorship a couple weeks ago. They did a great job on how difficult it is for even humans to sort out good content from bad. There's essentially no way an algorithm is going to do a good job if a human can't. Just creating the policy itself is nearly impossible!
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil
The idea of Facebook is essentially insane. Having ONE place for the whole workd where everyone is supposed to hang out and agree on the rules is ridiculous. Countries have different standards. Why is FB the arbiter of what's right/wrong?
Censorship will only lead to the end of FB. And I'm all for that.
I seriously doubt that such a machine could tell the difference between an exploited child post--from myself trying to sort through the sexual abuse that I personally endured as a child, which I sometimes share with others, in hope that it might create a dialogue to help them.
Machines cannot judge people.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I hate child sexual exploitation at least as much as the next guy, and I think that Facebook should not be a vehicle for it. But at some point Facebook clearly lost the thread, because they are now openly admitting that the pictures they're removing were not cases of child exploitation. That's why they're not reporting the millions of users affected: they did nothing wrong. So why are they taking down the photos? Because the photos offend people. That's really it. Specifically, it offends some people that a small subset of dirty old men will collect these photos and become sexually aroused. We are on top of a slippery slope, and we need to draw the line right here, because if we allow this as a legitimate reason for censorship, we are also signing off on the removal everything else that turns on dirty old men, like exercise videos, figure skating, swimsuit photos, olympic gymnastics, pictures of feet, balloons, ASMR, and I don't even want to know what else. We've completely shifted from the noble goal of protecting children from exploitation to the dubious goal of making sure that certain usavory people have nothing to masturbate to. And yet Facebook acts like the latter is the same thing as the former. It's just not. And yes, I think we should protest this now, even if we don't care about child bathing pictures. Because next they will come for some other stupid content that offends some people, and we'll again say nothing, because we don't care about that either. And then they eventually come to censor the expressions that we do care about, and nobody will be left to protest, because protest against censorship will by then also be censored.
Crops out everything but faces..unless someone could possibly get turned on by a face..
All this removal of child exploitation is really going to hurt the fantasy life of creimer.
we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath"
So they did not remove 8.7 million exploitative posts they just removed 8.7 million posts and some fraction of those could be large could be small for all we know were exploitative.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
One of the biggest surprises of my life has been how giving a platform to all has yielded more negative outcomes than we (in the tech community) could have imagined. Over 20 yrs ago, I read/heard the prevailing wisdom that giving a platform and a voice to everyone would lead to a massive democratization of ideas, a boon of quality information, and massive enlightenment. I admit to buying that. Today, that notion seems hopelessly naive.
Instead of a growth in human enlightenment through a well-informed citizenry, we have echo chambers, manipulations, and centralized corporate platforms that are largely sewers collecting the worst humanity has to offer- but now distributed globally for free.
8.7 million child exploitation posts. If the false positive rate is low this is most depressing.
The laws that would have protected individuals were scrapped or never passed by request from users.
Companies were actively encouraged to do whatever the hell they wanted, by the users.
Facebook was rewarded for past offences by an increase in users.
Your rights exterior to yourself don't exist in the Tea Party and Libertarian world view and businesses are free to do whatever they like. World views currently elected by the users and in office.
I cannot have sympathy for self-induced injuries, at least until those users take responsibility for their acts. Most unlikely, they're having way too much fun critiquing the popularity addicts they also supply.
I
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That argument won't work anymore. We all see what you're doing.
Of course we have to use violence. How else do you kill nazis?
The real socials issues are: ... and then killing them.
1. Abolishing private property
2. Making a list of all nazis
Since when did Facebook ban learn to code ads targeted at children? Oh wait ... I guess teaching every child a trade skill that is quickly becoming outsourced and underpaid while telling them "its the future!" Just to lower your labor costs isn't considered exploitation.
Wouldn't the images used for training be illegal. If so, how is it legally possible to train the network?
Is the poster notified an image was 'deleted'? Were people who followed notified? Were people who 'liked' image/post notified?
If not, then the vast majority deleted may not be immediately noticed. I don't think it should be the poster who is responsible to ensure they NOTICE an image being gone. I think it is the obligation of FB to notify folks when they remove an image, and in an extremely easy way for them to see what was remove, why, and object to removal, with a short timeframe for FB to undo action. And maybe even a required method for FB to return the image to the poster.
Yes, each individual should keep their own backups, but the vast majority of folks I know don't.....FB is there primary and backup.
The real question is how the hell they managed to allow 8.7 million exploitative posts in the first place... They ban conservatives for the most menial of infractions daily, but they've been turning a blind eye while accumulating nearly 9 million exploitative posts? Talk about fucked up priorities.
this is a good thing. google also has an api they share that uses ai to detect new child abuse photos. my idea is called facial recognition for children. you build a database of child school photos and then you run the exploited picture through amazons facial recognition service to find the school of the child based on the face in the photo. i just don't know how to build the database of all the school photos. someone should take my idea to ted talks or build an organization of volunteers to upload the school photos
"Select all Images with child pornography"
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Maybe they weren't reported because they aren't child exploitation posts.
It's a good start. Someday they may be able to remove all Facebook posts.