Phallus, Schniepel, Zumpferl, Johannes, Lümmel, noodle, pipe, brush, strap, hammer, cucumber, magic wand, thing, birdie. Many words and they all describe the same thing: the penis.
The possibilities for images of the male genital organ to be blocked on social media are as varied as the names for the male sexual organ. Apparently, even if it's just something that looks similar.
Asparagus for adults only
The reason for deleting genital-like images is Facebook's automated content filters. These recognize images that appear to show “sexually explicit” content and remove them. It can also be an innocent vegetable. That's exactly what happened to the Austrian company Ögreissler. Ögreissler is a local delivery service that primarily offers regional products. The company wanted to advertise its white asparagus with a photo on Facebook, which promptly ended up in the “adult content” drawer and was deleted. The operator himself responds to the incident with humor in another post: “I’ll just try using green asparagus, because the Americans don’t know white asparagus.” ( to the status post on Facebook )
Content filters make mistakes
Correction: The image was deleted by Google, not Facebook. The Ögreissler company wanted to use the image in question for an advertising campaign on Google and this as one of many motifs. Ögreissler received an error message from Google for that photo. “Adult-only content should not be used for advertising.” The advertisement will therefore not be delivered. Ögreissler says that he removed the motif and after that everything was fine again.
But it wasn't just white asparagus that fell victim to Facebook's content filters. In the past, posts were incorrectly removed due to the automatic detection of supposedly sexually explicit or copyrighted content. The Neptune statue (landmark of the city of Bologna) and a world-famous image from the Vietnam War showing a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack are just two examples of many.
Abuse of filter mechanisms
In addition to accidental bans, there are also cases in which people deliberately try to abuse the social network's filters. This was also the case in the US city of Beverly Hills, where an activist live-streamed a visit to the police station there. The police officers on site turned on a copyrighted song and played it loudly in the background - apparently to prevent the recording from being distributed.
EU copyright reform also prone to errors
Similar automated mechanisms are expected to be applied when the EU's new copyright reform comes into force. This is intended to oblige Internet platforms to check any content for possible copyright violations before publication. However, since the amount of content is too large for humans to do manually, upload filters will probably also come into play here. This means that in the future there will be the possibility of multiple, incorrect blocking of content across the entire Internet.
Source: Pornographic content: Facebook deletes photo of local asparagus – Webmix – derStandard.at › Web
Article image: Shutterstock / By barmalini
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )