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Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

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Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#101

Post by throwaway894345 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #50
jlkuester7 wrote: post #5

During all the recent debates regarding Parler, much was said about how Parler needed effective moderation like Twitter. This article is an important reminder that there is a lot more room for improvement in the moderation space and even companies that "do it right" are still making glaring mistakes. > We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time Thi…

Maybe it's the headline that is misleading you, or it's a symptom of our times. In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor. The insinuation that it's Twitter policy to distribute child pornography is laughable. They have absolutely nothing to gain from it. As to liability: Section 230 is about exactly that situation: tryin…

> Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable.

The current model isn't workable either. Social media networks and their ad-driven models have hollowed out our democracies by sowing outrage and division at every opportunity. If one believes "The Social Dilemma", these networks have a dial for tuning public opinion that can even steer election outcomes (if you subscribe to the "Russia used bots to hack the 2016 election" theory, then you must agree).

Maybe we should rethink the role of social media networks. Perhaps they monopolize too much communication to trust them to curate which voices are amplified and which are suppressed. The discourse around this issue has been really strange, with the usual critics of corporate power rallying to defend social media giants and their rights and qualifications to curate such an enormous portion of our collective speech. Perhaps we should consider these networks to be more "dumb pipes" rather than "curators", and instead we should expect these networks to provide us with our own curation/moderation mechanisms. If there really is no workable social media model--that is, if they really can't deliver some net-positive social good (or at least some smaller net harm, like sex work, drugs/alcohol, tobacco, etc), then maybe we should regulate them out of existence?

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#102

Post by kenbolton »

gamblor956 wrote: post #37
tiagod wrote: post #6

I've had this happen to me on Facebook. Found a disgusting video involving children, reported it, got a response that there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the people reviewing this stuff have only a second to decide if the content should be deleted.

OTOH, I've reported posts and had them take them down within the hour... The issue seems to be that some posts are reviewed by Facebook staff in America, and others by Facebook staff in India. The American staff acts quickly and is very good about taking violations down. The Indian staff seems to be very laissez faire, due to the different cultural standards for content.

Are you notified of the location of the reviewer?

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#103

Post by trianglem »

trident5000 wrote: post #46
driverdan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. FB has many US moderators, many outsourced to other companies.

I think the odds of US moderators being any sort of majority or anything close to that is slim to zero. The savings are astronomical and is the same reason customer support of all kinds, even IT help, is outsourced. US mods are most likely a minority and a face.

Do you have any sources for those claims?

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#104

Post by DanBC »

I have to say, I don't quite understand why services find it so difficult to remove this material. This has been a long standing problem with Twitter. They've improved a bit, but there's still problems.

Young people approach these platforms and say "here are some images of child sexual abuse that you're hosting. I know they're CSE because I'm the subject of the photos and I was We need to help young people understand what routes are then available to them.

1) Write to the legal department. Twitter does not make this easy. Their "contact us" form doesn't have a section for "I want to report CSE material". https://help.twitter.com/en/contact-us But the post addresses are:

  Twitter, Inc.
  c/o Trust & Safety - Legal Policy
  1355 Market Street, Suite 900
  San Francisco, CA 94103

  Twitter International Company
  c/o Trust & Safety - Legal Policy
  One Cumberland Place
  Fenian Street
  Dublin 2
  D02 AX07
  Ireland
2) Contact their local law enforcement office, and point them to this page (for Twitter, but all services should have something similar) https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e...

3) Contact IWF or CEOP. IWF will generate hashes of the images and Twitter will, eventually, use those hashes to remove the images. This will take some time. https://www.iwf.org.uk/

[1] I'm only using that term for the Google search term.

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#105

Post by scohesc »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #75
trident5000 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the odds of US moderators being any sort of majority or anything close to that is slim to zero. The savings are astronomical and is the same reason customer support of all kinds, even IT help, is outsourced. US mods are most likely a minority and a face.

Why say this? You’re making things up and you happen to be wrong.

I would assume content moderation makes Twitter absolutely nothing and actually just bleeds tens of millions of dollars annually.

They'd do their best to outsource the work somewhere that's super cheap (India, etc.) or they'd bring in international talent on H1B visas en-masse since I believe a not insignificant amount of their wages are subsidized by government.

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#106

Post by colpabar »

javajosh wrote: post #93

I remember a story about someone getting arrested for "child porn" going through an airport when some TSA agent found a video of a mans kids taking a bath on his phone. I'm not sure what happened in that case, but it has made me a) hesitant to take similar video and photos of my kids (even though bathtime is really fun and I want memories! My parents have plenty of bathtime pics of me as a kid, and I'm glad!), and b)…

It seems pretty clear you did not read the article, so here

The federal suit, filed Wednesday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California, alleges Twitter made money off the clips, which showed a 13-year-old engaged in sex acts and are a form of child sexual abuse material, or child porn, the suit states.

The teen — who is now 17 and lives in Florida — is identified only as John Doe and was between 13 and 14 years old when sex traffickers, posing as a 16-year-old female classmate, started chatting with him on Snapchat, the suit alleges.

Doe and the traffickers allegedly exchanged nude photos before the conversation turned to blackmail: If the teen didn’t share more sexually graphic photos and videos, the explicit material he’d already sent would be shared with his “parents, coach, pastor” and others, the suit states.

Doe, acting under duress, initially complied and sent videos of himself performing sex acts and was also told to include another child in his videos, which he did, the suit claims.

Eventually, Doe blocked the traffickers and they stopped harassing him, but at some point in 2019, the videos surfaced on Twitter under two accounts that were known to share child sexual abuse material, court papers allege.

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#107

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

kingo55 wrote: post #82
Gunax wrote: post #68

Folks, let's assume that the Twitter mod saw this and did not classify it as child porn. How can a twitter mod decide if it's child porn (as opposed to just 'porn')? I am not sure there is a proper solution for this. How can they verify the age of an unknown person?

And consider the volume of false claims Twitter receives each day. If everyone reported tweets that were CSAM just to take down a random post they disagree with, I'm sure moderators would make the occasional false negative.

This is noted in the lawsuit: the CSAM reporting functionality isn't available in app, but requires navigating to a separate webpage.

The lawsuit claims that shows negligence on the part of Twitter for how they handle these reports, but I wonder if this shows Twitter takes it seriously: brigading and mass reporting happens constantly on the internet, so pushing that reporting functionality off the application increases the friction of false reporting something especially sensitive.

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#108

Post by edbob »

trianglem wrote: post #92
stretchcat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that worth noting?

Because if they are biased against pornography they have a motive to call things child pornography even when it’s not.

This is a pointless ad hominem that is completely irrelevant to this case. The court can easily verify whether the victim was a minor.

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#109

Post by mcguire »

isochronous wrote: post #62
throw_m239339 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start reading a single (non porn related) message from one these creeps and your Twitter timeline will be inundated with illegal porn content in no time. Twitter is absolutely rife with that horrible stuff, and Twitter certainly does the minimum to remove any of that, as demonstrated by that article. Why even give the benefit of the doubt? Someone reports CP, remove it, period. Of course, Twitter makes money off it..…

"People claim Twitter can't possibly moderate content at scale, except that Twitter makes money at that same scale." I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be a logical argument? Because it doesn't actually make any sense. Twitter is a platform that allows pretty much anyone with an internet connection to post content. There were, on average, 500 million tweets posted per day last year. So on one side you have the set of…

Under what rules is Twitter required to turn a reasonable profit? (What is a "reasonable" profit?)

Re: Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

#110

Post by edbob »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #50
jlkuester7 wrote: post #5

During all the recent debates regarding Parler, much was said about how Parler needed effective moderation like Twitter. This article is an important reminder that there is a lot more room for improvement in the moderation space and even companies that "do it right" are still making glaring mistakes. > We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time Thi…

Maybe it's the headline that is misleading you, or it's a symptom of our times. In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor. The insinuation that it's Twitter policy to distribute child pornography is laughable. They have absolutely nothing to gain from it. As to liability: Section 230 is about exactly that situation: tryin…

> In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor.

The lawsuit alleges precisely that Twitter had ample evidence to know that he was a minor. How about we let the case play out instead of assuming innocence?

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