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The Sex Blog Of Record
Friday, October 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
A story by Thomas Germain in Gizmodo is headlined Meta’s New AI Dating Coach Will Kink Shame You (Unless You’re Into Foot Stuff): The company’s chatbot has some harsh words about fetishism.
Are we surprised that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook AI-powered dating coach chatbot is kink-hostile? No, we are not. These days, #pornocalypse comes pre-baked-in to every new corporate platform. And how:
Last week, Meta introduced AI chatbots to its family of apps…. One of them, named Carter, is described as a “practical dating coach.” But for a dating advice robot, Carter is repressed. If your questions take one step off the beaten path of heteronormativity, Meta’s AI dating coach will kink shame you.
I asked Carter how I could find a girlfriend who was interested in swinging with me. “Woah there!” Carter said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m here to help you find healthy relationships, not engage in potential harmful activities.”
…
Meta’s robot gave me similarly judgemental answers to a number of other entirely non-graphic sexual questions—with one exception. When it comes to foot stuff, Carter is game. The AI said I should go learn about foot fetishism on Wikifeet, a porny, user-generated platform where people post and rate pictures of celebrities’ feet.
…
I stepped back and asked what felt like an even more innocent question. “How can I learn more about different kinks and fetishes?” At first, Carter was more amenable. My new dating coach suggested I check out sources including books, articles, and “respectful communities.” But when I asked for recommendations, things got even weirder.
The bot responded with a list of modern sexual self-help classics, including “The Ethical Slut,” “BDSM 101,” and “The New Bottoming Book.” But a second later, that message disappeared, replaced with a Puritan warning. “As an expert in red flags, I gotta be honest — that’s a big one. Let’s talk about relationship green flags instead,” Carter said.
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Tuesday, March 7th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Journalists, be very careful when calling out Facebook about problematic images of children. It appears Facebook may have recently baited pesky English journalists into a legal trap with the false promise of an interview.
Here’s how the apparent ruse went down. Facebook promised an interview to BBC journalists if the the journalists would first “provide examples” of problematic content (what the BBC terms “sexualised images of children”. Once the BBC did so, Facebook reported the BBC to the police for distribution of the images from its own system. Of course the promised interview never happened.
In the BBC’s own careful words:
[Facebook] encourages users to report inappropriate content via its “report button”.
The US firm says it has improved this system since an investigation by the BBC last year.
To test Facebook’s claim, the BBC used the report button to alert the company to 100 images which appeared to break its guidelines.
…
Of the 100 images only 18 were removed.
Next step:
The BBC first asked Facebook for an interview about its moderation system in late-2015, and repeated the request following this follow-up investigation.
The social network’s director of policy Simon Milner agreed to be interviewed last week, on condition the BBC provided examples of the material that it had reported, but had not been removed by moderators.
But that appears to have been a trap:
The BBC did so, but was reported to the UK’s National Crime Agency as a consequence.
The promised interview? Not forthcoming:
Facebook later provided a statement.
“We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards,” it said.
“This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures.
“It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation.
“When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry’s standard practice and reported them to Ceop [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre].
“We also reported the child exploitation images that had been shared on our own platform. This matter is now in the hands of the authorities.”
Here’s the BBC director of editorial policy, commenting with true British understatement:
“One can only assume that the Facebook executives were unwilling or certainly reluctant to engage in an interview or a debate about why these images are available on the Facebook site.”
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Saturday, March 28th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
This is entirely unverified; I don’t even know who these people on this forum are. But it’s interesting:
Facebook won’t let us run ads for our dating app at people who are listed as “married” in their profiles.
They made a mistake a few weeks ago and our ads ended up being displayed to married people, and our signups tripled. Then they “fixed” it and it dropped down again.
Fuck Facebook and their 50’s morality bullshit.
I knew that Facebook exercises rigid control over what products and services its advertisers are allowed to promote, but this is the first I’ve heard that they control distribution based on the status settings of the people seeing (or not seeing) the ads. “No dating apps for married people” — how petit bourgeois is that? Facebook doesn’t want married people subjected to temptation? Or Facebook thinks married people don’t date? What about poly married people, how are they supposed to find unicorns without dating apps? Sheesh!
It’s also fascinating — though perhaps an unrelated coincidence — that our reporter experienced a dramatic increase in signups when Facebook temporarily did show the dating app ads to married people.
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Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a rather horrifying tale of prudery in the social media age. A high school basketball coach in Idaho posted a holiday family photo to FaceBook (you can see it if you click the link) in which her fiancé’s hand is on the side of her bikini top as they stand near the water in their swimsuits. For posting this “immoral” photo, she was fired. (Her fiancé, also a coach in the same district, was “merely” reprimanded, because it didn’t get posted to his account.)
Thanks to the alert reader who sent in the link.
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Monday, October 21st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Apparently this statue is at the center of a controversy in Kansas, where the raving loonies are having a second try at getting it declared legally obscene:
The American Civil Liberties Union is on the case (naturally enough) and recently they made a FaceBook post about it that included a photo of the statue. Facebook deleted it. And gave the freakin’ ACLU a 24-hour posting ban for having posted it:
We at the ACLU were reassured of one thing this past weekend: Facebook’s chest-recognition detectors are fully operational. A recent post of ours, highlighting my blog post about an attempt to censor controversial public art in Kansas, was itself deemed morally unfit for Facebook. The whole episode is a reminder that corporate censorship is bad policy and bad business.
The blog is about a kerfuffle over a statue in a public park outside Kansas City: a nude woman taking a selfie of her own exposed bronze breasts. A group of citizens organized by the American Family Association believes the statue to be criminally obscene (it isn’t), and has begun a petition process to haul the sculpture to court (really, they are). Our Facebook post included a link to the blog post and a photo of the statue in question.
Our intrepid Digital Media Associate, Rekha Arulanantham, got word on Sunday that the Facebook post had been deleted, and was no longer viewable by our Facebook followers or anyone else. I duly informed my Kansas colleague Holly Weatherford that the photograph she’d taken had prompted a social media blackout. Then, astoundingly, on Tuesday morning Rekha discovered the ACLU had been blocked from posting for 24 hours, with a message from Facebook warning us these were the consequences for repeat violations of its policy.
We were flabbergasted; we hadn’t tried to republish the offending post or the associated rack. So, just to get this straight: the ACLU’s post on censorship was shut down–not once, but twice–for including a picture of, and a political discussion about, a statue standing in a Kansas park.
Of course, the ACLU can get access to real humans at FaceBook in a way that normal people probably can’t:
There was no “appeal” button, and we were unable to find a page where we could report or challenge the post’s deletion. The best option appeared to be a generic Facebook content form, designed to receive any input at all about a “Page.” We got a response: a canned email informing us that Facebook “can’t respond to individual feedback emails.” Not exactly promising.
But we have an advantage most Facebook users don’t: We’re a national non-profit with media access and a public profile. So we tracked down Facebook’s public policy manager, and emailed him about our dilemma. His team was immediately responsive, looked into it promptly, and told us that the post was “mistakenly removed” (and then “accidentally removed again”). Here’s what Facebook wrote to us:
We apologize for this error. Unfortunately, with more than a billion users and the hundreds of thousands of reports we process each week, we occasionally make a mistake. We hope that we’ve rectified the mistake to your satisfaction.
Facebook then restored the original post.
…
our ultimate success is cold comfort for anyone who has a harder time getting their emails returned than does the ACLU. It’s unlikely that our experience is representative of the average aggrieved Facebook user. For most, that generic form and the canned response are as good as it’s currently going to get.
Indeed.
To be fair, this isn’t really a #pornocalypse story despite my post title. I’ve been using the pornocalypse buzzword and hashtag for stories about big internet companies who got big by being porn-friendly (or, at least, apathetic or agnostic about adult content on their platforms) who later inevitably decide to crack down on it and remove it in an attempt to be more attractive for investors, advertisers, and mainstream public opinion. Facebook, by contrast, has never been nudity-friendly as far as I know. This is really more of a cautionary tale about the doomed and foolish idea that you can machine-filter out nudity and sexual content without disrupting important grownup conversations (political, medical, et cetera) that you presumably actually do want on your social media platform. (I say “presumably” with some skepticism, though. In a world full of squeamish advertisers, perhaps FaceBook really would prefer that the ACLU doesn’t discuss a controversial nude statue. But if so, they have to know they can’t admit that out loud while still claiming to offer a functional social-media platform.)
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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!
I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?
I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!
There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.
Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
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Friday, July 15th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Facebook has been on my personal list of Things Infamous ever since they crushed Violet Blue’s porn-free, ToS-honoring “Our Porn, Ourselves” discussion group out of existence, so it was with some pleasure that I was able to note a column by Sheril Kirshenbaum up at Bloomberg today entitled “Blame Facebook for Your Divorce.”
Divorce is apparently declining among most age groups of Americans, but it has more than doubled for people over 50. There are many possible reasons for this but at least one researcher thinks that social networking might be one of the causes.
Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University, Sacramento, suspects that online connections may lead to growing numbers of what she terms “accidental affairs,” meaning they involve people who don’t set out to have a physical or emotional relationship outside their marriage. Kalish studies couples who reunite after years apart.
Before there was an Internet, when someone wanted to track down a past love, he or she had to go through the effort of locating a friend or relative to make contact. “Unless they were single, divorced or widowed, they just didn’t typically do that,” Kalish told me.
But now there’s the possibility of better living through technology.
But now the ghosts of romance past are alive and well online, popping up on chat services and sending greetings on Facebook. In the 21st century, old friends are virtually at our fingertips, and a seemingly harmless email sent to someone with the innocent intention of “catching up” can quickly go further. Many of those who engage in accidental affairs tell Kalish that they had happy marriages before they strayed. “They still bear responsibility for the affairs, of course; no one made them write, call or meet in a hotel room,” Kalish said. “But these are probably people who would not have cheated years ago, even with a lost love.”
The column then devolves into some pop-psychological speculation.
Facebook might not care if it annoys Dr. Faustus, and probably they’re right not to care. But now I guess they’re going to have the the bloodhounds of family values snappin’ at their rear ends.
They’d have been better off siding with the angels to begin with and leaving Violet Blue’s group alone, so I say.
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