Photo sharing service 'Pinterest' excludes harmful content such as pornography and conspiracy theory from search results rather than deleting it



There is a lot of harmful content on the photo sharing service 'Pinterest' such as sexual photos of girls, conspiracy theory, and assertions of white supremacist,

OneZero of the technical media reported.

Pinterest Hosts Sexual Images of Young Girls, Anti-Vax Memes Despite Moderation Promises | OneZero
https://onezero.medium.com/pinterest-hosts-sexual-images-of-young-girls-anti-vax-memes-despite-moderation-efforts-52d8a1007e1e

Pinterest is actively moderating that the content on the platform is healthy, and its efforts have been often appreciated. However, OneZero did some research and found that there was a lot of harmful content that bypassed the filters used to moderate Pinterest. OneZero notes that the findings highlight the risks of Pinterest's moderation approach of 'hiding' rather than removing dangerous content from the platform.'



A Pinterest spokesperson told OneZero, 'We want to be a place of inspiration, a safe and positive place for our users. If we find content that shouldn't be on Pinterest, We encourage you to report to the operations side, we're evolving Google's standards to run preventative tools to find and remove content based on reports from our users. We also seek advice from outside experts on how to implement and improve it.'

Ben Silverman, CEO of Pinterest, has taken a different approach than other platforms by

claiming that the platform is 'a catalog of choice for its users' rather than a social network. Facebook and Twitter have dealt with harmful content by deleting millions of harmful posts and accounts, but Pinterest bans search for harmful content such as 'wrong information about vaccinations and cancer treatments' Is dealt with.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Pinterest's search engine does not completely eliminate harmful content, but rather blocks potentially misleading keywords from its search results. For example, if you search for 'vaccine' on Pinterest, dozens of disclaimers regarding medical hoaxes and useful information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control will be displayed in the search results.



Pinterest moderation is an approach that excludes harmful content from search results rather than deleting it. This approach isn't perfect, and OneZero says that in its research, harmful content that violates Pinterest's community guidelines is available on a number of platforms. National Observer reporter Caroline Orr also points out that BDSM products, which are harmful content, are next to children's furniture. According to OneZero, 'There are cases where this kind of harmful content is hidden from the search results, but in most cases it is easy to find.'



About this, a Pinterest spokesperson said, ``If you think your search results are likely to be dangerous, they could cause serious harm or imminent risk, so you should block the search results completely. However, not all search results violate our policy, so this block occurs at the search query level and does not remove the underlying content.' Acknowledges that it is 'excluded from search results' rather than 'deleted content'.

We recommend content based on your browsing history on Pinterest search results. However, it seems that many harmful contents can be displayed in search results while logging out of Pinterest or can be found via search engines such as Google. It's unclear whether or not users will browse content on Pinterest in this way, but they're exposing the potential risks of excluding harmful content from search results rather than deleting it. Said One Zero.

A spokeswoman for Pinterest said, 'We are taking steps to identify the content and prevent it from being discovered, but even if it is determined that it violates the community guidelines, the violating content is displayed in the search results of the search engine. We acknowledge that there are cases in which some of the harmful content may be displayed in search results such as Google search.

In addition, OneZero reports that harmful content that could be found on Pinterest was conspiracy theory about child pornography / 5G and new coronavirus / racist assertion by white supremacist.

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