Facebook announces AI system to detect revenge porn, says accounts posting it will be deleted

Facebook first started trialling a system to combat revenge porn late last year, but it had one rather scary aspect: you had to upload your own nudes so the platform knew which images it should block. The earlier system, which is still in use and set for expanded rollout, relied on users uploading photos they were afraid might be shared, allowing Facebook to create a digital fingerprint to block uploads of matching images. You send the nude to yourself in Messenger, and Facebook creates a hashed digital fingerprint of the photo – an encrypted version of the raw data in the image file. Anytime someone tries to upload a photo, it is checked against that fingerprint and rejected if it matches. Facebook says its new AI-based system is designed to automatically detect nude or near-nude images, before passing them for a human moderator to decide whether the photo or video should be blocked.