How LGBTQ+ content could become illegal
In 2020, Yulia Tsvetkov, a 26-year-old Russian theater director and artist, found herself under house arrest, facing up to six years in prison. Her crime? Sharing feminist and LGBTQ+-friendly artwork on social media, which authorities branded as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors.” Just a year earlier, Michelle, a 53-year-old transgender woman, was sentenced […]
Announcing AskLex.ai
Navigating legal challenges, whether business or personal, can feel overwhelming and time-consuming. It’s no wonder many people are now turning to generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to answer their legal questions, with greater convenience and far lower cost than traditional legal services. But despite the advances made in generative AI over the past several […]
Bluesky melts down over Jesse Singal
Bluesky has been melting down in a fight over controversial journalist Jesse Singal, and pedophilia allegations have been flying freely.
Australia Versus Human Rights Online
Australia is one of the few countries of its size, democratic or otherwise, that doesn’t protect human rights in its constitution. Although the High Court has judicially constructed a few constitutionally implied human rights, these are very narrow. In particular, the implied freedom of speech right recognised by the High Court only extends to political […]
Dead Dove: a content warning plugin for WordPress
What should a social media platform do about content that is lawful, complies with the platform’s terms of service, but could be offensive to some of its users? Expecting users to deal with such content by proactively blocking it will burden and drive them away. On the other hand, burying such content leads to a […]
Cybersecurity for Trust and Safety Professionals Handling CSAM
Following five years working in trust and safety in the United States, this year I moved back to Australia. While here, I received a notification from Cloudflare’s excellent CSAM Scanning Tool (reviewed here) that a forum post uploaded to a website of one of my clients had been identified as suspected CSAM (child sexual abuse […]
Drawing the Line: Australia’s Misguided War on Comics
Did you know that bringing a comic book into Australia that contains scenes of consensual sexual bondage is illegal? That you could be arrested for doing so, under the same provision of the Customs Act that you’d be arrested for if you brought in real child sexual abuse material (CSAM)? This is just one of […]
Modtools Image: Open Source Image Moderation
Among the many challenges that image moderators face, one is the lack of open source tooling to support their work. Platforms are forced to either fork out big sums for proprietary image moderation dashboards geared at the enterprise (such as Thorn’s Safer.io), or to reinvent the wheel by creating their own dashboards and their own […]
Trading Privacy for Child Safety
This morning I was privileged to be part of a panel event on Child Protection in an Age of End-to-End Encryption. The event, chaired by Dr Gilian Tenbergen, also featured digital forensics expert Aaron Weiss who gave an excellent presentation that you can also view directly after mine. The slides of my presentation are available […]
AI and Victimless Content under Europe’s CSA Regulation
On November 14 the European Parliament presented its compromise take on the European Commission’s controversial draft CSA Regulation. Commissioner Ylva Johannson’s proposal mandates that Internet platforms operating in Europe conduct surveillance of their users. It effectively requires them to use AI classifiers to sift through a vast stream of private communications to identify suspected child […]
