Internal (Myxer) email on content filtering

As a follow-up to my post of the other day, here’s an email I sent internally regarding our procedures for dealing with potentially offensive content.

From: Myk Willis
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 4:42PM
To: mVisible Technologies
Subject: Dealing with Potentially Offensive Content

I’ve written about five drafts of this email, with each one turning into a book that I can never find the time to finish. So while this actually turned out to be fairly lengthly, please understand that there is a lot (I mean a lot) of caveats, special cases, apologies, and admissions of deficiency swirling in the background that I wasn’t able to get into any readable form.

Filtering Potentially Offensive Content

By default, every user account (and anonymous web visitors) has a setting called “content filtering” that is turned on. Registered users may disable this content filtering in their account settings if they so choose.

The “content filtering” switch is intended to prevent potentially offensive user-submitted content from being displayed to users who have it enabled. When content filtering is on, three things happen:

(1) User-submitted text is run through a profanity filter before being displayed;

(2) Content from the catalog marked as “potentially offensive” is removed from all browsable or searchable areas.

(3) User-submitted images (note: this does not include wallpapers, which are covered by #2 above) that have been marked as “potenially offensive” will be filtered.

Mechanics of Filtering Profanity

All user-submitted text, including user profile names, item titles, descriptions, biographies, tags/keywords, comments, and probably some others I forgot, are run through a “sterilization” process before being written to an output page. If the content filter is on, any word or phrase in the text that matches a known ‘dirty word’ will be substituted with grawlixes so that, e.g., “shit” becomes “$%^!”.

The known dirty words are maintained in a file that is part of the project, and we can adjust them if need be. I would caution, however, that my advice for patrons of Taco Bell (“never, ever, open the burrito”) applies fairly well to this text file as well.

Note: Tags (keywords) that match a profanity will not be displayed at all.

Mechanics of Filtering Images

Users may submitted images to Myxer in three ways: (1) as user profile images, (2) as images associated with ringtones or songs, (3) as actual content items (wallpapers and videos).

Every new image uploaded to the site will be queued for review by a lucky member of our staff. We will commit to reviewing new images within 24 hours of their submittal, though we will likely “work the queue” during the day to keep up with new stuff.

There is no delay between when an image is submitted and when it may be displayed to other users, so there is a 24 hour window during which potentially offensive content may be in general circulation.

We currently do not have a method of knowing when images of type (1) and (2) have been changed, so we will have to do a little work to insure changed items are re-queued for review. (Wallpapers and videos are immutable, so we can get away with just reviewing them upon creation).

Deciding Which Images are Potentially Offensive

Please understand this is one of the points at which I could go on for volumes describing the impossibility and subjectiveness of any attempt at this. But I won’t. Instead, I give you my version of “you know it when you see it”:

Potentially Offensive Content is: any image containing
enough exposed flesh to embarrass you if your children and/or parents found
you looking at it.

This definition is, I believe, much more conservative than what we’ve previously applied to the site. In particular, an image need not contain full or partial nudity in order to be considered offensive. Extremely scantily-clad persons in suggestive poses would fall in this category as well.

Beyond Potentially Offensive

Full nudity is not allowed in the MyxerTones catalog. Any item containing nudity will be excluded from the catalog, such that it will not be visible in search/browse even if content filtering is off.

Anything beyond “simple” nudity will be deleted upon detection, and may result in termination of the originating user account.

Common Sense

Each of us, as employees, members of the Myxer community, and human beings has the right and responsibility to mark content as “potentially offensive” that we believe could bring harm to members of our community, whether because of nudity, hate speech, or whatever. Don’t be a slave to any particular rule, and do what you feel is Right at the time. We can and will revisit our decisions and guidelines often.

In Summary…

It isn’t our intention to be the moral cops of the mobile universe. As I’m sure most of you understand, the classification of something into the category of “offensive” depends in an impossibly complex way on the individual and the circumstance. And the importance of self-expression to our user community is self-evident. We have an important mission, and now a mandate from the masses, to be a force that works tirelessly to move what should be personal decisions about content choice out of the hands of the carriers and into the hands of the – duh! – individual. So I don’t want us to ever fall into the trap of blindly imitating the behaviors of those that have come before us.

When ever we are accused by outsiders of crossing some line – be it with regard to allowing the possibility of hosting offensive content or copyright abuses or whatever – it is invariably a result of our position as a disruptive force in their industry. With so much control in the hands of the corporations entrenched in these industries, it takes a strong will – and sometimes an extreme position – to have any affect at all.

Tweaking how we identify and deal with potentially offensive content is part of our overall goal of providing a friendly and comfortable environment for our users while still allowing for a maximum amount of personal choice and self-expression. Rest assured that we’ll continue to revisit this topic until the end of time.

As always, massive amounts of flame mail are invited!

Myk

P.S. Have a spare half hour? I have some more musings on my blog that may be of interest to provide further background on my personal thinking on the subject: http://mykwillis.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/holy/