A filter for dick pics. At Slate, writer Jane C. Hu wonders, “Why couldn’t the big social media companies do this?”
Last week, Kelsey Bressler woke up, checked Twitter, and found a photo of a stranger’s dick in her DMs. Understandably, she was not pleased—“Nothing like waking up to an unsolicited dick pic,” she tweeted before messaging the stranger back to tell him his antics were not OK. A friend Bressler met online through activism work saw Bressler’s tweet and offered to make something she, and every other person who’s experienced cyberflashing, would want: a filter that can recognize and automatically remove penis photos.
… [A] survey by market research company YouGov found that 78 percent of millennial women said they’d received an unsolicited dick pic. As men send their willies willy-nilly via dating apps and social media messages and abuse iPhones’ AirDrop feature to penis-spam their fellow passengers on the subway, Texas and New York City are working to criminalize “cyberflashing.”
Ms Hu notes that Twitter’s responses to complaints of unsolicited dick pics isn’t consistent.
In 2017, another Twitter user ran into a similar problem when her harasser created three accounts, all with the same display name and avatar, and messaged the same dick picture from each account. When she reported each account, Twitter gave her three different responses: one told her to report the dick pic directly, another locked the reported account, and a third found “no violation of Twitter’s Rules regarding abusive behavior.”
So Bressler decided to take matters into her own hands. After her friend created an A.I. and used a database of not-safe-for-work images to train it to recognize penises, Bressler turned her experience on its head: She went on Twitter to ask for dick pics to test the filter’s accuracy.
https://twitter.com/raeBress/status/1169625733750124544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1169625733750124544&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fslate.com%2Ftechnology%2F2019%2F09%2Fsocial-media-unsolicited-dick-pics-filter.html
The whole story at Slate
