From The Washington Post
Social network Parler inundated with explicit imagery
By Rachel Lerman, Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell
Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute...
"When you say, 'We don't moderate content,' you are inviting this content," said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley computer science professor who has helped develop image-detection technology used by social media sites. "My prediction is they will be overrun with this stuff."...
The image-detection technology that Farid, the UC-Berkeley computer scientist, helped develop allows social media sites to find images of child sexual exploitation, also known as child pornography, so they can be removed before being viewed by users or human moderators. He said Parler's approach may make the site vulnerable to those who upload child pornography, which, though illegal, infiltrates social media platforms unless measures are put in place to detect and remove it.
Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in the School of Information and department of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
