cipherface:

londomollari:

Please I just really need everyone to understand that an actual human person presumably looked at this screenshot of R2-D2 and C-3PO from a short-lived 1980s star wars cartoon and Thought They Were Having Sex

Online image moderation is a very poorly cobbled together system. It’s mostly done by folks in very poor countries. They have to look at many hundreds of images per day and quickly approve or disallow them in order to make a living, as it’s piece work. Pennies per X number of images. They may not have much access in their off time to the internet or foreign media to get the context they would need to make fine distinctions between softcore robot porn and a scene from an old cartoon.

One thing they surely know is that error checking is performed by sending the same image to multiple workers. If they all agree with you, things flow smoothly. But if you are too often the odd one out, approving porn or flagging sfw images while the others who looked at it voted the other way, then you’ll be laid off. This probably leads them to be conservative about all judgment calls, in the hope the others looking will do the same, so they can all agree most of the time and all keep their jobs.

I don’t say this to call you out or be a downer, just to let you all know this is how the sausage gets made. This is how we can use the internet for years and only rarely find something truly nasty in our feeds. It’s not thsnks to algorithms. It’s because other humans are looking at it for us. Given how this moderation system just barely works, we should not expect it to get much better any time soon.

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed