March 10 (Portaltic/EP) –
pinterest will implement two tools that will allow users to notify the platform of the existence of boards that promote pedophilia, a decision it has made after NBC News reported how some men were taking advantage of its recommendation algorithm to create boards with images of pedophilia. girls where you are they shared sexual comments.
Pinterest is a visual discovery engine that is used to find ideas such as recipes, inspiration for the home and style, as explained by the platform on its website. In it, the users or pinners collect images from other users and They post them on their boards.
The platform, through its recommendation algorithm, would be allowing users to create boards with images of minors carrying out daily activities, in which they have been intercepted comments of a sexual and pedophilic nature, as recently shared NBC News.
This medium has carried out an investigation in which it created a Pinterest account and reviewed hundreds of accounts created by girls, as well as the pages of their followers, “many of whom appeared to be men,” it has indicated.
From NBC News they remember that creating boards with images of this type and attributing a sexual purpose or a suggestive title to them is legal, so the platform cannot carry out an action that neutralize these illegitimate activities.
Although it cannot retaliate against this type of action, Pinterest is promoting this type of photogallery, since Pinterest itself recommendation engine is the one exposes minors in adult searches, as verified in the analysis.
Although this content “it is published innocently”, some users are using it “to generate sexual interest towards children”, as explained by Stephen Sauer of the Canadian Center for Child Protection.
Like NBC News, Sauer followed a similar strategy to find these types of recommendations from children on boards with images of minors. It was then that she noticed that some of them had received “sexually suggestive comments”.
To illustrate this problem, NBC has exposed the case of a user on probation who joined Pinterest after being released from prison, after serving 27 years for attempted murder. After receiving a communication from the television network, she removed all three of her profile boards that contained images of girls.
PINTEREST ACT
From the platform they have recalled that they prohibit “any type of conduct that sexualizes minors” and have argued that they have “a strict policy that does not tolerate content that can exploit or endanger minors”, according to statements collected by Europa Press.
With this, they have qualified that when they detect “that users save collections of harmless images or non-sexual in a way that could be seen as contributing to the sexualization of minors,” they immediately take action, including deleting boards and blocking users.
To mitigate this issue, the platform has announced two new tools. One of them will allow users to report boards and another that introduces additional categories of reasons to report users of this service.
YOUTUBE, A SIMILAR CASE
It should be remembered that this case shares similarities with the one revealed in May 2019 on YouTube, when blogger Matt Watson warned that a flaw in YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm was putting pedophiles in contact with each other in videos of minors carrying out daily activities and that, moreover, they were being monetized.
These individuals took advantage of a so-called ‘wormhole’ in the algorithm, which caused the algorithm to recommend, in what was deemed to be a low-level pedophile network, non-sexual videos of minors. This favored the proliferation of inappropriate comments and that these messages could be exchanged on the platform.
In this context, YouTube took action and removed the videos and channels that were immersed in said pedophilia network and denounced the illegal activities carried out by these individuals. Finally, disabled comments.
